Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland 9780857450456

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Politics of Time

Politics of Time Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland

Leszek Koczanowicz

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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8/11/08

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First published in 2008 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2008 Leszek Koczanowicz All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koczanowicz, Leszek. Politics of time : dynamics of identity in post-communist Poland / Leszek Koczanowicz. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-84545-510-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Group identity--Poland. 2. Social psychology--Poland. 3. Post-communism--Poland. I. Title. HN537.5.K585 2008 306.209438'09049--dc22 2008030298

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-84545-510-1 (hardback)

To my parents Wiesia and Tadeusz Koczanowicz and to my son Tadzio

Contents

Preface

ix

Chapter 1 Political Time or the Past as a Political Issue Memory of Politics, Politics of Memory: The Politics of the Past in Post-totalitarian Poland Mechanisms of Exclusion and Inclusion Liberating the Future from the Past: Liberating the Past from the Future The Politics of Political Biography: Self-realization, Loyalty, and Political Change Civil Society as an Ethical Challenge Life as Simulacrum: Stanislaw Lem’s Science Fiction

1

Chapter 2 Social Time or the Ontology of Expectations Ontology of Expectations Genealogy of Expectations The Myth of the Unity of the Nation Marxism as a Way of Life: The Failure of an Impossible Project The Mythologies of Solidarity Chapter 3 Perspectives on Time: From Philosophy to Anthropology The Problem of Time in Pragmatism and Phenomenology Time, Dialogue, and Society Time and Social Practices Politics of Memory, Politics of Time

1 18 21 28 42 54 67 67 72 74 83 97

109 109 117 120 132

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Contents

Epilogue

What has Happened to Us? The Rise of Post-post-communism The Emergence of Post-post-communism or Populist Post-communism What is Post-post-communism? Democracy against Democracy or Who has Hijacked the Common Background? Possible Scenarios and Two Conservatisms New Tribalism, Post-post-communism, and the Politics of Time Epilogue – Supplement

137 137 139 143 145 149 150

Appendix Post-communism and Pop Music: Annihilation or Restoration of Memory in Disco-polo Two Views on Disco-polo: Intellectuals’ “Horror Vacui” and the Nation’s Hope “All Poles” or What is Disco-polo? The Glorious Past and the Slavic Soul In Opposition to the West Disco-polo and the Dilemmas of Polish Past and Present

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

177

153 153 154 157 159

Preface Michael Oakeshott once observed that the most general condition of freedom is “a diffusion of authority between past, present and future.”. He went on to say1: [W]e should consider a society governed wholly by its past, or its present, or its future to suffer under a despotism of superstition which forbids freedom. The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail, none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.1

This statement, I think, involves a couple of theoretical assumptions about the nature of the time order. First, this perspective is grounded in the assumption that such arrangements are possible at all. Human beings are supposed to have a free hand in organizing the relationships between past, present and future. It implies the existence of social time, which is different from physical time and has its own logic and physics. Second, Oakeshott’s standpoint presupposes that there are better and worse descriptions of time at least in reference to freedom. He however suggests that the social order as a whole depends on these arrangements. It involves the subordination of time to social values. The logic of social time is then interwoven into the whole texture of social relationships. It creates them but it also depends on them. Third, the relationship between time and the individual is also one of reciprocal dependency. The individual is immersed in time and his existence is restricted by time limits. On the other hand, however, an individual as a part of society, is a creator of time. He can master it and shape it according to his needs. Fourth, the manipulation of time can serve political purposes. Therefore, time is not innocent in its relation to politics. It can be consciously used in the political game as a powerful weapon. In this book I present some tentative answers to these questions. I intend to combine a theoretical analysis of the problem of the construction

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of time with the application of the theory to the case of contemporary Polish discussions on the problem of the communist past. Poland, like other countries going through the painful process of transformation, has to deal with a set of questions about ways of handling the past. Is the proper arrangement of present, past and future a necessary condition for the sound functioning of society? Is it possible to construct time in which people make crucial political decisions? How broad are the limits of the manipulation of time? Is social amnesia a requisite condition for the wellbeing of a society in transition? Or is for such a society the most important task to understand and overcome the past? Each of these issues has provoked stormy argument between the supporters of different political options. To rationalize such an argument is, however, necessary in order to put the issues in a broader context, to find general categories which can serve as a framework for the discussion of concrete cases. Otherwise, the discussion of the past demands an endless effort to justify the current political positions of people involved in it. Thus, I intend to propose such categories and at the same time to investigate their fruitfulness in applying them to the Polish case. I introduce a division between social time and political time which is, I think, a logical consequence of the foregoing considerations. The authors I refer to present two clear patterns of dealing with the problem of time. On the one hand, time is considered to be a kind of a priori in society, and seems to penetrate the deepest layers of societal existence. On the other hand, time is considered to be a political phenomenon used in the political struggle and is very important in constituting the political field. I would like to have the first function associated with the label “social time”, and the second with “political time.”. Chapter One is devoted to the problem of political time, and I have used the case of contemporary Poland as a paradigm case for my considerations. After discussing at length the politics of the past in posttotalitarian Poland, I proceed to a theoretical discussion of the crucial slogans of political time: “liberating the past from the future” and “liberating the future from the past.” The succeeding sections of Chapter One are devoted to the autobiographical narratives of former members of the Polish nomenklatura, and to the idea of civil society as it was developed by Polish dissidents in the seventies and eighties during the struggle against the communist regime. I conclude this chapter by discussing the work of the outstanding Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. I argue that the politics of time has affected even spheres that appear to be distant from any political involvement.

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Chapter Two deals mainly with problem of social time; that is, as I have mentioned, a priori time of a society. Social time is based on an ontology of expectations. I argue that we have to differentiate societies according to diverse “ontologies of expectations” and that this difference has a great influence on their mode of functioning. Again I turn to the Polish case and the three fundamental trajectories of the genealogy of expectations that have had a decisive influence on the present state of Polish society. I consider first of all the nation, as the most important denominator of Polish political and social discourse, secondly Marxism, and the consequence of the failure of this ideology, and thirdly the great significance of the Solidarity project. My concern is to show that between them they create a unique social time for Polish society. In Chapter Three I outline the philosophical background of the problem of social time and give examples of the usefulness of this category for the social sciences and humanities. This chapter also discusses my own philosophical motivation which I have found in American pragmatism. This book is a result of the intersection of my double interest: first in social philosophy understood as the relationship between an individual and its social environment, especially political and social institutions, and second in American pragmatism conceived as a philosophy of dialogue, social interaction, and democracy. Pragmatism, however, is also very interesting for people attempting a conceptualization of the politics of time. They can find in this philosophy rich resources for treating history not only as collection of facts but also as a vivid reality always influencing the present and the future. When the communist regime collapsed and people in the liberated countries tried to come to terms with their pasts, it was obvious to me that a philosopher’s perspective on the past has to be different than that of a historian. This book proposes such a view of the past in the context of a broader perspective on the general relationship between the past, the present, and the future. Such a broader perspective, I believe, can help us not only in understanding our history but also in understanding ourselves as human beings immersed in history and at the same time always striving against our finitude. I am of course entirely responsible for the content of the book, but during my work on the subject I received invaluable advice, support, and help from many institutions and individuals that I would like to thank. I started this program some years ago and the first ideas and hypotheses were developed during my stay as a Senior Fellow in the stimulating environment of the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. I am very

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grateful to this institution and its Rector, Krzysztof Michalski. Owing to grants from the Kosciuszko Foundation I had an opportunity to spend some time in the United States researching and teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Buffalo, and Columbia University. I benefited greatly from discussions with Martin Jay and Hans Sluga (Berkeley), Rodolphe Gasché (Buffalo), and John Micgiel (at Columbia’s East Central European Center). During my work on this book I have worked in various academic institutions. I am very grateful to my colleagues of the Department of Psychology at Opole University and the Department of Cultural Studies at Wroclaw University for their help and encouragement. I am especially grateful to the authorities of my current employer, the University of Lower Silesia of the Association for the Advancement of Education in Wroclaw (DSW), and especially to Boguslawa Dorota Golebniak, VicePresident for Research and Foreign Co-operation, for providing me with money for editorial work. I received many very interesting remarks from Michael M. J. Fischer, of M.I.T.’s Anthropology Department, who was the reviewer of the first version of my manuscript. I have also made use of the insights of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which first helped me shape the book. Timothy J. Madigan was the first person who persuaded me to write the book and gave me many interesting suggestions. Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz allowed me to collaborate on her film project on the fate of dissidents in Eastern Europe, which enabled me to gain insight into their thinking on political and ethical matters. My doctoral student Rafal Nahirny helped with some technical questions and we had interesting discussions on the problem of things past. Kasia Liszke aided me with preparing the index. Dr. David Schauffler has improved my English grammar and made many interesting philosophical remarks. Prof. Elzbieta Matynia of New School University in NYC, besides many interesting remarks, helped me to coin the final version of the title. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Dorota for her support and tenderness.

Chapter 1

Political Time or the Past as a Political Issue Memory of Politics, Politics of Memory: The Politics of the Past in Post-totalitarian Poland Post-communist Poland and the Communist Past: Everybody in Power, Everybody in Opposition When Aleksander Kwasniewski, once a member of the Party nomenklatura, was elected Polish President in 1995, it was to Paris that he paid one of his first foreign visits. There he visited the Institute of Culture, met its founder Jerzy Giedroyc, and assured him that reading the journal Kultura had always been a source of intellectual stimulation. As it was immediately noted, Kultura was regarded as the main ideological threat to Communist Party domination, and loyal Party members (of high rank especially) were not supposed to enjoy this kind of literature. Kwasniewski’s ploy, however, is a good example of current embarrassment connected with the past. Former Party members can confess their attachment to opposition ideals, and on the other hand, some Solidarity heroes (for instance Zbigniew Bujak) have felt obliged to make excuses for this movement. The roots of this embarrassment reside in the “historical compromise” made at the Round Table Agreement in 1989. This Agreement, which ended communist rule in Poland, turned out to be a trap for a great part of the Polish opposition. Discussing the form and method of sharing power with communist authorities meant in fact legitimizing them. Therefore, when massive support for changes in Poland and in the Soviet Union enabled people to potentially break free of any kind of communist ideology, the new leaders had to solve the moral dilemma of whether or not they should stick to the agreement in this situation. This dilemma was also a political problem consisting of two issues: (1) how to carry out changes without massive resistance on the part of people who supported the old regime, and (2) how to define a revolution which was

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organized through an accord with its enemies. It is probably true that the Round Table Agreement enabled us to avoid bloodshed in Poland, and in other countries it served as a model of solving conflicts. On the other hand, it made it much more difficult to discuss the communist past because such a discussion became automatically embroiled in the assessment of political programs carried out by the very people who worked out this deal. Participation in the Round Table enabled people of the old regime to claim that the changes were in fact also their achievement. If we perceive the past from this standpoint, then communism appears as if it gradually evolved into a kind of liberal society and this evolution found its final expression in 1989. Much of political life in Poland in recent years has revolved around the problem of the possibility of describing and evaluating the communist past. This chapter is devoted to the question of the perspectives which were deployed for this objective.

The Dilemmas of the Moral Perspective The moral perspective seemed to be the most obviously useful for dealing with the communist past. In 1989 it appeared as a matter of course that the communist state should be condemned and the only question was the degree of blame. The temptation was to follow the model of the discussion held in Germany after the Second World War, especially Karl Jaspers’s famous lectures The Question of German Guilt, with his careful differentiation between criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt.1 However, using Jaspers’s reasoning in the Polish situation would be difficult for at least two reasons. First, the basic idea of metaphysical guilt contains as a necessary component the idea of a transcendental principle which can be employed in evaluation of the political situation. Even if metaphysical and moral guilt can, as he said, be judged only by individuals themselves as an instance of violating transcendental rules, the implication of this idea was an assumption that an evaluation of political and criminal guilt must be measured by the effort which had to be made in order to reestablish the moral order. The external intervention, the victor, is only an instrument for achieving this goal.2 I think that only political intervention from the outside or the prevailing of one side in the conflict permits the use of a transcendental principle as a guideline in political practice. In a situation where the transformation was completed as a joint enterprise of both sides in the conflict, it seems impossible to employ such a totalizing perspective. For the same reason, it was difficult to blame all people as sharing political guilt, which Jaspers

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could do in relation to the Germans.3 From 1956 we had in Poland a constant process of successive waves of people leaving the Communist Party and assuming a more or less oppositional attitude.4 Also, the Polish Communist Party (PZPR) was, especially in the 1970s, relatively open. It included about two million people, and there were no sharp boundaries between the Party, even the people in power in the Party, and the rest of society. Last but not least, communism in Poland was established by a foreign power, the Soviet Union. Therefore, the common excuse was that the political (or geopolitical) situation imposed certain kind behaviours which could be described as “lesser evils.” This excuse was used by the people who ruled Poland before 1956 in the darkest time of Stalinism but also by the people who masterminded martial law.5 This logic was often questioned, especially with reference to people in power, but it was widely used by common people as a kind of guideline in everyday behavior. I will return to this issue later. The other totalizing perspective which could be applied was that of reconciliation. It was the official standpoint of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s government, expressed in the famous declaration of a “thick line” which should divide past and present. I do not think that this policy was introduced mainly for tactical reasons, or as the effect of a conspiracy between the opposition and the then ruling circles, which is now a common accusation by the right wing of the Polish political scene. Its sources were rather in Christian personalism, the philosophy which was accommodated by liberal Catholics in Poland, and in the tradition of the “secular left.” The first put emphasis on the human individual as a basic entity of God’s intervention in the world, expressed in the category of “persona.” As is well known, this doctrine is close to existentialism and can even be identified with this tradition. Personalism shares with existentialism the idea of social responsibility and the critique of “commodified society”, which enabled Catholics affiliated with the weekly journal Tygodnik Powszechny and monthlies Wiez and Znak to find a kind of compromise with the communist power. The compromise, however, was always fragile, especially when the rights of the individual were at stake. The secular left accepted to some extent the idea of social responsibility and a revised socialist economy without evoking transcendental sanctions. They referred to the notion of “honor” as a heritage of the Polish socialist movement. Nevertheless, both groups agreed to make a sharp distinction between the past and present as a consequence of the dialogue and compromise with communists. If you get into discussion and seek compromise, you cannot treat the other party as an enemy. You share responsibility with them and must treat

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them as real partners. This statement would be the shortest version of the reasoning which was a basis for the politics of the “thick line.” Thus in fact the philosophy of the “thick line” was intended not to forget the past but rather (to use Jaspers’s terms) to introduce a cleavage between metaphysical and moral guilt on the one hand, and political and criminal guilt on the other. However, regardless of the intentions of its creators, this idea had very important political implications.

Ethics and Politics: The Dilemmas of Political Choices The moral perspective of sharing responsibility gave rise to problems of political strategy for supporters of the communist regime. At the beginning of the transformation it seemed relatively clear. Politically motivated crimes should be punished like any other kind of crime, and the price of political mistakes should be disappearance from the political scene. To achieve this purpose the legal apparatus was set in motion to investigate the crimes of the secret police from the Stalinist period up to 1989, and the Sejm (parliament) attempted to introduce procedures which would prevent former communists from taking important positions in political life. Matters, however, turned out to be much more complicated. Lack of any clear vision of the past resulted in a hopeless situation for the Solidarity group in the Sejm, in relation to how they dealt with former communists. On the one hand, the communists were not treated as full partners in the political game; on the other, it became clearly impossible to exclude them entirely from participation in politics. First, they still had some support, and secondly, more importantly, as one side in the “historical compromise” they were supposed to have the same rights as the other side. For the same reason, several attempts to introduce a special law applying to people involved with the previous regime have failed. So-called “decommunization” provoked unending and complex discussions about what rank of former regime people should be removed from positions in the new system. The other problem concerned elected positions. What if people chose former officials of the communist regime? Worse problems arise if one tries to judge who was an agent of the regime and who was not. The archives were destroyed or are incomplete, proofs of collaboration are very ambiguous, and it remains hard to describe what was real collaboration and what might have been only an attempt to deceive the police. Opinions on this topic were very ambiguous among political leaders. They were prone at least to some extent to support such attempts in order to ultimately demolish

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communist power in Poland. But, on the other hand, the only serious attempt to identify all former agents of the communists resulted in the collapse of the government. This happened because the government, led by Prime Minister Jan Olszewski, used police archives without critical analysis, and it turned out that a number of people who had been leaders of the underground movement were registered by the police as their agents. The government revealed these names and almost immediately got overturned by an angry parliament; yet the problem remained unsolved. One paradox of this situation was that former communists themselves were free from such accusations, for the security police had not been allowed to recruit party people as agents. The other paradox is that the main authority in judging who was an agent would have been former police officers as they had the best knowledge on the topic. It was similar in the case of the crimes committed by the authorities of the old regime or the secret police. For the Stalinist period there has been a political consensus but lack of evidence, as the age of the accused and witnesses as well as the amount of time that has passed have made the procedure extremely difficult. The closer to the 1980s, however, the more diverse the opinions that were held on the issue of punishment of political crimes. For the top authorities it was impossible to prove that they had broken the Constitution in their actions or that they had given orders which forced their subordinates to break the law. There was no evidence on secret police officers as the secret archives were not revealed at their trial. Therefore, only a few cases have been brought to court, and still fewer have resulted in sentences. This situation changed when a new law on the past was introduced in 1997 and significantly modified in 1998. The decision to introduce the law on lustration was taken for several different reasons. First, Lech Walesa, after his defeat in the 1996 presidential election, denounced Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy of the post-communist party as a Soviet spy. This political affair made the politicians of different camps realize that nobody could be protected from such an accusation, and that a rational move would be to set a clear system of discussing such cases. Second, the results of the parliamentary elections of 1997 put in power the coalition of the right-wing Election Action of Solidarity (AWS) and the centrist Freedom Union. AWS was a loose coalition of different parties and movements and had made decommunization one of the most significant issues of the election campaign. Third, politicians understood the growing consciousness of ordinary people that “something” should be done with the past. This problem divided Polish voters into two almost even camps. So it was very tempting to use such an issue as a

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weapon in the political game. Fourth, the post-communist party, in its search for moral legitimization, was ready to agree on at least some very limited law dealing with the communist past. Eventually, after long and stormy discussion, the Polish Sejm in June 1998 accepted a law (despite the opposition of the post-communist party), which allowed an examination of the past of some categories of people, including elected officials, attorneys, judges, and prosecutors. This law was supplemented by the decision to establish an Institute of National Memory, which was supposed to investigate and prosecute culprits of the communist system and also to open the files of people persecuted under communism to the victims. At the same time the Sejm formally condemned the communist system as totalitarianism. The new law has radically changed discourse about the past in a legal sense. Those holding high office who were accused of being secret agents could appeal to the special court, and the past of those running for elected office was checked out. The Institute of National Memory started some investigations into communist crimes and also allowed (at least in theory, as the procedure turned out to be very slow) people to look at their files. However it seems that in a political and psychological sense not so much has changed. When Lech Walesa, during the presidential election in 2000, was cleared of the accusation of collaboration with the secret police, this verdict convinced only those who were already convinced. His opponents immediately started to point to gaps in the materials and the suspicions of conspiracy were raised again. The same thing happened in almost all cases considered by the special court. The Polish leading newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza waged a campaign against the idea of lustration itself as well as against the public prosecutor who was to represent “the public interest.” The idea and the person were defended by the same political powers which had supported the concept of decommunization before. Thus it seems that despite a significant change in the legal system, the political landscape barely underwent any modification.

Everyday Life and Totalitarian Systems: The Dilemma of Historical Analyses In a situation where the past is at stake, the natural course is to turn to historians as experts in describing and evaluating past events. In fact, Polish historians did a good job of trying to find a historical perspective for what was happening. However, there are clear limitations, arising from at least two sources, to the usefulness of historians’ analyses for the social construction of the past.

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First, historians are divided in their opinions concerning the period in Poland between 1945 and 1989. This diversity originates not only from the difference in collected materials and archival work but also from the political or social perspective accepted. According to Andrzej Friszke, Polish historians are divided into three camps in regard to post-war history, and especially to the period of 1956–89. The first perceive this period as a continuation of the Stalinist totalitarian state, and the second claim that after 1956 Poland ceased to be a totalitarian state and became authoritarian or half-democratic, while the third would like to do analytic work to show the advantages and disadvantages of the Polish version of communism.6 It can be easily recognized that these opinions largely reflect the personal views of the historians. Polish historians share such difficulties with historians from other post-totalitarian states. For instance, the German historian Konrad Jarausch claims that despite a great effort to investigate the GDR’s past, the academization of the debate may not yet be fully possible because of the political sensitivity of the issue. The most important problem concerns the reasons for the collapse of communism. If it were assumed that communism was an imperfect implementation of egalitarian aspiration, then the verdict would be different than if it were assumed that the communist state had a totalitarian character from beginning to end.7 Second, even if historians succeeded in building a single unified version of post-war history, it would need to be confronted with memories of everyday life in order to become powerful enough to regulate political and social behavior. At this point historians of the communist period have to face a problem which was widely discussed by German historians dealing with the Nazi era. Alltagsgeschichte (everyday life history), if not buttressed by a more general perspective of historical process and ethical responsibility, can easily turn into a kind of nostalgia for the past or assume an apologetic tendency.8 In fact, in Poland we have a strong tendency to “normalize” the past, especially for the period after 1956. This tendency is to some extent justified, as the late 1950s and much of the 1960s were a period of “small stabilization”, to use one writer’s phrase; the period when people for the first time since 1939 were able to rebuild their lives without the nightmare of an omnipotent terror. It was also a very interesting period in terms of culture, producing a series of fruitful discussions in social sciences and philosophy. The 1970s were in turn marked by Poland’s opening up to the West, and for first time since 1939 Polish people were able to enjoy some freedom of travel. In both cases, successive generations had a feeling of living a more “normal” life than their precedessors, or of being in better circumstances.

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There is another factor which is often referred to, and in my opinion, overestimated, as an explanation of communist “nostalgia.” This is said to have arisen from the mood of uneasiness in the new situation. People who got used to living in circumstances defined by communist bureaucracy came to feel lost in the new situation of market economy. Sometimes this mood is characterized as a kind of “escape from freedom,” and this explanation is fairly common among disappointed former dissidents. I think, however, that this nostalgia is caused by the specific circumstances of economic and political transformation rather than by metaphysical traits of human nature. People idealized the system of institutions and style of life they became used to as a reaction to the unpredictability of the new situation, but this “unpredictability” arises out of mistakes made by the political elite as well as out of the “objective” character of the process of transformation. Here we touch upon the widely-discussed question of the relationship between present activity and ways of past-formation. It is difficult to find a general rule which could define whether the image of the past depends on current activity or whether it is relatively independent and can influence an ongoing social process.9 I will discuss this complicated theoretical matter below. Nonetheless, it is clear that the changing picture of the communist period in Poland is closely correlated with the process of social differentiation during the transformation. This tendency has had important political consequences. The third source of “communist nostalgia” is a mixture of the appreciation that the communist authorities had for the arts (even if they persecuted artists they gave them, by the act of persecution, a special place) and veteran nostalgia simply for an unambiguous moral situation. Here we have again two problems involved: the evaluation of the past (factual statements: investigation into the role of culture, preferred patterns, etc.) and the discontent with culture and personal relationships in post-totalitarian Poland. Acceptance of the communist regime at the everyday level was so prevalent that even some right-wing politicians are ready to sacrifice their ideological views for the sake of political efficiency. For instance, a journalist for Mysl Polska, Pawel Siergiejczyk, writes: The biggest mistake of the Polish right wing is its anti-communism. … The task of rightwing politicians should be to show that they appreciate the efforts of past generations – in work and struggle – that soldiers of the Polish People’s Army were not worse then soldiers of the Home Army, and Col. Kuklinski should unambiguously be considered a traitor.10

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This quote shows the tension between the moral and political perspective on the past. The Home Army, the underground organization fighting against the Nazis, was considered patriotic contrary to the Polish People’s Army, controlled by the Soviets and used by them as a tool for subordination of Poland. Col. Kuklinski was an agent of American intelligence who defected to the West in 1981 and provided the Americans with important information about the military and political situation in Poland and other communist countries. For the right wing the moral estimation is obvious. The Home Army realized the national interest, and Col. Kuklinski was a hero of the resistance to communism. However the need for the political usage of the past can significantly modify this judgment.

Our Past and their Past. Reemergence of the Post-communist Left A new chapter in the discussion of the past was started when it became clear that the main political power on the left wing of the Polish political scene was in fact Social Democracy of the Polish Republic (SDRP), formed in 1990 by the group of the former members of nomenklatura, and that it had organized a parliamentary coalition called the Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD). The left wing of Solidarity (including figures such as Ryszard Bugaj and Karol Modzelewski) was not, despite great efforts, able to create a real political alternative to the post-communist left. This situation gave rise to a significant paradox of Polish political life; that the relation to the past seems to be more important than social and economic programs. Because of their similarity of political perspective, all the major forces of Polish public life tend to differentiate themselves by emphasizing differences in relation to the past. This issue, along with some derived issues, such as relations with the Catholic Church, is now a characteristic feature of election programs. It seems to have a great emotional impact, and for this reason it can be easily used in political games.

Toward the “Realpolitik” of the Past The possibility of solving this dilemma was found in a universalization of the political strategy adopted at the Round Table Compromise. What was a special agreement made in very particular circumstances was to become a model for the political reading of the past. Not only social reality but also the interpretation of the past were to be discussed in a process of negotiation. The past then became a sphere of compromise

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between struggling parts of society. At the theoretical level the idea of negotiating the past took the forms of “suspension” of judgment, “taking into account all possible perspectives,” or “conscious forgetting.” The most important expression of such a strategy was a newspaper article written by Adam Michnik and Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, “Of Truth and Reconciliation.”11 In this article, the authors showed that the process of confrontation over the past is caused by the different evolutions interpretations of recent history, and proposed to form a committee consisting of persons of various views. Such a committee could give an independent judgment of history and find a place for compromise. This proposal gave rise to an intense discussion going in two directions. On the one hand, this exchange dealt with the limits of historical interpretation, and on the other it involved the political meaning of the paper. The real significance of the paper was ascribed to the political context of presidential elections in Poland, and it was seen an attempt to create a new political power which could overcome differences having their sources in the past. Thus, Michnik and Cimoszewicz’s paper was, in opposition to the literal intentions of the authors, not treated as an intervention in discussions about the past but as a kind of political manifesto of the future. In this it seems to share the fate of other attempts to describe the past. Each of them was involved in political discourse and became a factor in the political game. However, to accept their thesis that every vision of the past has the same validity would lead us into cognitive nihilism. To avoid two extremes, on the one hand the idea that the past is useful to present politics, and on the other the notion of the past as objectively legitimized, one needs to work on the integration of different perspectives. The employment of current values and historical description should supplement each other and at some point meet the everyday experience of the past. Then the politics of the past can achieve a level of autonomy that makes it impossible for politicians to use the past as a simple tool in the game of political power.

Back to the Past. Moral Revolution and the Fourth Republic It has, however, turned out to be impossible to cut the past off from current politics in Poland. A new wave of the politics of the past started in 2004. The immediate background of this recurrence is clear. After four years of the post-Solidarity government (AWS), the post-communist left returned to power. The Alliance of the Democratic Left got more than forty per cent of the votes by focusing on itself the hopes and expectations of a society

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tired of ineffective right-wing government. Expectations were very high and the government did not live up to them. The economic situation of the country remained difficult, with the unemployment rate close to twenty per cent. Despite the fact that the ruling Left could point to some spectacular successes, such as the entry of Poland into the European Union, a majority of people were deeply disappointed with the results of its political and social decisions. All the more so as it became clear that the Left, whose main slogan had been to get rid of widespread corruption, turned out to be even more corrupt than its predecessors. The event that triggered the critique of not only the Left but the whole political class of Poland was the so-called Rywin affair. Lew Rywin was a well-known film producer and businessman very active in Polish showbusiness. In July 2002 he visited Adam Michnik, the editor-in-chief of Poland’s largest-circulation daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and a famous former dissident, and presented him with a proposal that he make a colossal bribe in order to obtain a new law which would favour Gazeta Wyborcza’s plans to buy a commercial TV station. Michnik recorded this conversation and made it public in his newspaper. This was a shock to public opinion, as Rywin had suggested that he represented an enigmatic “group holding power” which was able to force any legislation through the Polish parliament. If his words were true then the consequence was that the Polish Sejm and law was “for sale.” In response to these accusations, the Polish Sejm formed a special multi-party committee to investigate the affair. The committee did not reach the truth about Rywin’s offer, but the investigation and especially the public hearings broadcast on radio and television revealed the scale of corruption and incompetence of public officials all the way up to the Prime Minister, Leszek Miller. Special committees in other cases exposed even more drastic mechanisms of corruption. The immediate result of these investigations was a rapid decrease of support for the Alliance of the Democratic Left, but they had also other farreaching consequences. First, the whole political elite stood accused that, after overturning the oppressive communist regime, it could not create a more just state, but in fact could only repeat the practices of the communist political system. Second, the failure to deal with the communist past was given as the main reason for this situation. The Round Table agreement of 1989 became a scapegoat for all the vices of post-totalitarian Poland in the eyes of the proponents of radical change. This view was reinforced by the activity of the Institute of National Memory, which had started many investigations into communist crimes. Its archives enabled the Representative of the Public Interest to search into the past of prominent

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public officers. Although court procedures were long and complex, in many cases important officials were found guilty of “lustration lying”: they were shown to have lied in their statements about having contacts with the communist secret services. Therefore, it was relatively easy to assert that Poland was still being governed by a network of former security officers and that they had transferred their style of doing politics into the new Poland. In this atmosphere, a major turning point was the revelation of a list of names from the catalogue of the Institute of National Memory: the socalled “Wildstein List.” Bronislaw Wildstein, a well-known journalist and former dissident, had criticized the slow speed and limited scope of lustration in Poland. At the end of 2004 he publicly exposed the contents of the name catalogue of the Warsaw Branch of Institute of National Memory. In this catalogue the Institute had collected the names of people who had been registered by the Polish secret service. On this list could be found the names of officers, secret agents, and collaborators, and also those of victims of the system who were spotted by the intelligence service as potential agents. Wildstein’s argument was that making the list public was necessary, because it could help identify people who had actively supported the communist regime. He accepted the widespread idea that post-totalitarian Poland was ruled by the old network of Party officials and former secret agents who came to terms with the opposition party at the Round Table talks. The publication of the “Wildstein List” was supposed to break down this network and to radically change the situation in Poland. Wildstein said that even if some innocent people had to suffer because of the publication of the list, such sacrifice was a worthwhile price for speeding up the lustration process, which in turn should lead to the construction of a new Poland liberated from the sin of the Round Table talks. The “Wildstein’s List” affair was in harmony with increasingly popular slogans about building a Fourth Republic. The First Republic had been the gentry-led democracy (democracy limited only to this group) destroyed by the partition of Poland at the end of 18th century. Poland’s return to independence in 1918 marked the beginnings of the Second Republic, which was smashed by the Nazi invasion in 1939 and subsequent Stalinist terror. When Poland rejected the communist regime in 1989, the new situation seemed to call for the establishment of a Third Republic. The idea of setting up a Fourth Republic was invented by right-wing politicians and intellectuals to indicate a radical break with the transformation after 1989. The Fourth Republic was to be a return to the original ideals of Solidarity. The unity of the nation, the solidarity

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between people of different social backgrounds through returning to traditional values (especially Christian values), and ethical politics understood as service to the nation and not as the gaining of privileges by politicians, became the landmarks of the idea of the Fourth Republic. In other words, the aim was to reconstruct a lost community, and the more intellectual ideologists of the Fourth Republic even referred directly to the communitarian standpoint in political philosophy. For advocates of the Fourth Republic the main enemy of this community restoration was an alliance of some post-communists and some former dissidents. This alliance promoted supposedly liberal values in the economy and social life, wanted to forget the communist past as the necessary condition for this coalition, and above all was seen as a network of egoistic interests which gave rise to all-powerful corruption. The fifteen years of transformation were regarded as “lost time”, as this period was deemed to be merely a continuation of the communist regime: the same ideology with maybe pseudo-acceptance of market rule, and the same fate for ordinary people, which only made their economic and social situation worse. The same politics, of undermining national and religious values, was ascribed to the alliance between the post-communists and the liberals, because they were apparently united by the common belief that traditional values were the main obstacle to the modernization of Poland and should therefore be eradicated. The proponents of the Fourth Republic found places in different political parties, but they were united in the conviction that the most important condition for the creation of the new republic was to wipe out the post-communist network and that lustration was perfect tool for this purpose. So suddenly, after fifteen years of the democratic Poland, the problem of the past again became the hottest political issue. On the surface, this reemergence of the past seemed to be a “natural” consequence of the dominance of right-wing political discourse in Poland. This account agrees with that of Noel Calhoun, presented in his book Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe’s Democratic Transition, an excellent analysis of the process of decommunization in Eastern Europe. He argues that the former dissidents were attached to the principles of liberal democracy and that they attempted to harmonize them with the desire to bring to justice the officials of the old regime. However, he shows that this idea gives rise to dilemmas which were barely solvable on the ground of liberal democracy. A liberal democratic regime might choose to judge the old regime’s criminal according to the letter of the criminal code, ignoring the contradictory clauses, statute of limitations, and amnesty laws as well as the jurisprudence of the old courts. … In punishing members of the old regime for committing human rights abuses, the courts uphold the value liberal

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democracy places on the protection of the individual against the power of the state. They demonstrate that henceforth all will be equal before the law. At the same time they may uneasily suspect that they are violating hallowed principles of liberal democracy. … The judicial system (and society at large) are invited to debate which principles … deserve primacy. The public should engage in reasoned deliberation to formulate an acceptable compromise. However, it is equally likely that such a debate will overburden the agenda of a society in transition and raise doubts about the strength of democratic institutions.12

The developments in Poland in 2004 and 2005 seem to confirm to a great extent Calhoun’s thesis. Questioning the politics of forgetting, even if it does not automatically entail putting into question the principles of liberal democracy, means at least searching for some corrections to those principles. These can assume, for instance, the form of introducing religious and national values into the public sphere, or announcing the solidarity between different classes and groups based on those values. It also implies some limitations to the ideological neutrality of the state, which, it may be thought, should promote certain values in education, culture, and social life. In the economy, the idea of the need to introduce values into the rules of market was expressed by the idea of pro-family policy in taxation and labour legislation. The idea of strengthening the power of the president at the expense of parliament also fits this philosophy. A strong president should more than compensate for the deficiencies of the lawmaking institutions and for the limits to liberal democracy. All these initiatives require cleaning out the relics of communist rule, thought of as the main threat to these needed radical changes to social life. This explanation can be supplemented by another perspective given by David Ost, an American expert on Poland. He also connects the dominance of right-wing discourse in Poland during 2003–2005 with the crisis in liberal democracy but he displays the sources of this crisis in a different light. For him, the most important question, which has never been resolved, is the process of transformation in class politics. Summarizing his argument, he writes: Organization according to class is not only important but inevitable in a class-divided system which East Europe has become. But labor in East Europe does not think politically in terms of class, having emerged from a system in which class conflicts were secondary, and having struggled against communism armed with ideology that originally downplayed class, and then transformed itself into a defense of the class interests of an emerging bourgeoisie alone. Labor is not now attracted to democratic class based appeals, as can be seen in the weak showing of liberal social democrats. This leaves labor open to political parties that address class concerns but offer irrelevant scapegoats as being responsible for the problem. The task facing post-communist governments and parties is to push labor toward expressing their class interests in a democratic way.13

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Ost wrote these words in 1995, when it was not clear that the political scene in Poland could change as drastically as had happened by 2005. Yet he was able to repeat his diagnosis in 2005, when it turned out that many of his predictions were confirmed. In a book with the meaningful title, The Defeat of Solidarity, Ost attempts to explain why the Solidarity movement shrank drastically in membership, and instead of remaining an ideologically open organization (as it was in 1980) became a very rightwing trade union.14 Ost, like Calhoun, sees the problems of implementing liberal democracy in Poland, but he reverses the order of cause and effect. For him, the main reason for the dominance of right-wing discourse in Poland is the rejection of class politics. Polish liberals from the onset of the transformation neglected the interests of the working class, treating it as an obstacle to the transformation. Therefore, workers did not have any means of expressing their demands, and they accumulated a great potential anger that had to find ways to manifest itself. The easiest way was to blame a conspiracy of some former dissidents and postcommunists. From this point of view, the sudden rise of the politics of the past was a symptom of the deeper process of workers’ dissatisfaction with their ideological marginalization. For Calhoun, the problem of decommunization is a touchstone of the possibilities of liberal democracy, while for Ost, decommunization is a symptom of liberal democracy’s inability to assimilate working class anger. Those two explanations do not have to be contradictory; they can be complementary if we take into account the complexity of the political scene in Poland. The two right-wing or centre-right parties which, after the 2005 election, respectively formed the government and the principal opposition, represent two sides of this issue. The Law and Justice party stressed the idea of solidarity, understood as solidarity between classes and social groups, which resulted in a program of developing a social security system in economics, and the idea of creating more fair social relationships in politics. Civic Platform, the principle opposition, is more liberal; it proposes decreasing market regulation, for instance supporting a flat tax of fifteen per cent. It also insists that fighting corruption should remain the main goal of the new government. However, the 2005 election campaign was full of paradoxes. It started with slogans claiming that it is necessary to overcome the postcommunist dominance in politics, which meant also a return to the “ideals of Solidarity.” The parties, Law and Justice and Civic Platform, which, according to the polls, had the greatest support, announced that they would like to work together to “mend the state” which had been spoiled by the post-communists. So, at the beginning, it seemed that the

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main stake of the election would be the radical break with the communist past, the break that had not occured in 1989. Both parties declared that it was their main goal. It was even more evident in the parallel presidential campaign. Lech Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice, announced that this campaign was a struggle between “Home Army” Poland and post-communist Poland. The Home Army was the legendary resistance organization that fought Nazi Germany and also opposed the Soviet occupation of Poland. Kaczynski, who was born after the Second World War and never participated in the resistance, evoked this “Home Army” as a symbol of the struggle for independence. He referred to his family narrative, contrasting his father to the father of the left-wing candidate Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, who had been an officer in the resistance force that supported the Soviets. Kaczynski tried to play his campaign as a kind of crusade against post-communist domination in politics. The situation changed radically when Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz withdrew from the election, and the main competitor to Kaczynski became the leader of Civic Platform, Donald Tusk. The anti-postcommunist rhetoric suddenly turned out to be futile and it was necessary to create a new kind of contrast. Kaczynski decided to play the card of liberalism. He set up his campaign as a struggle between “liberal Poland” represented by Donald Tusk and the Civic Platform, and “solidarity Poland” represented by himself and his party. This strategy turned out to be successful, as Law and Justice took first place in the election, which was a big surprise for Polish pollsters. Civic Platform took second place, and both these parties left their other opponents far behind. The Social Democracy of Polish Republic, the post-communists, got about eleven per cent compared with almost fifty per cent four years earlier. These outcomes allowed some analysts to describe this election as free from the shadow of the post-communism discussion, and as showing that the main competition was between the two post-Solidarity parties. In theory, both parties were supposed to share the “ethos of Solidarity” and accept the same set of values, but in the election campaign it turned out that they were separated by profound differences. Law and Justice stressed traditional values and the idea of nation and religion, and also an economic program friendly to the poor with serious limitations placed upon the free market. Civic Platform in turn was preoccupied mainly with economic progress, promoting its slogan “3 x 15%”, proposing a flat tax at this level for all three spheres of the economy. They wanted to create favourable conditions for the development of the middle class, even at the price of the well-being of the lower strata of society, at least

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for some time, until there was radical growth in the GNP. However, Civic Platform also put much more stress on the traditional liberal values of freedom and the rights of individuals. Therefore, both parties presented a mixture of left-wing and right-wing rhetoric: the Civic Platform party was right-wing in economics while slighty left-wing in the cultural sphere, while Law and Justice, with its emphasis on social solidarity, was more left-wing in economics and right-wing in its politics of identity. In this election, Law and Justice achieved the great, double success of winning the most seats in the Sejm and its leader, Lech Kaczynski, winning the presidency. Yet it was not able to form a coalition with Civic Platform and it had to create a minority government without a decisive majority in the Sejm. This situation made the pundits think about the real meaning of the 2005 election in Poland. As I have said earlier, at first glance two contradictory answers seemed to be plausible. The first is that the election broke down the vicious circle of postcommunist politics with its fixed opposition between the Solidarity heritage and post-communist ideology, and instead set up a new kind of politics within the Solidarity “circle” which of course naturally split up into different orientations. A clear confirmation of this is the fact that the postcommunist parties fared very badly in the election and that the two winners were parties formed by people connected with the former opposition. Some interesting consequences follow from this view. It seems that Poland stands at the conclusion of its transformation, and is now a battleground, familiar in Western Europe, between more free-marketoriented parties and those more socially inclined. Like any other European country, Poland has some particularities in its development. This Polish Sonderweg (the particular way) would seem to consist of two main features: the Polish political elites connected with the Solidarity movement, and the special role of the Catholic Church. Accordingly, the anti-free-market orientation would have to take a form connected more with the “social teaching of the Catholic Church” than with the ideals of social democracy, accepting class solidarism as well as Catholic and national values in culture. The free-market-orientation in turn would limit its radicalism for the same reasons. Moreover, such an emphasis on traditional values is reinforced by the common ethos of Solidarity, which has in its background class solidarity and the acceptance of Catholic Church teaching. As the result of those processes we can say that the Polish political spectrum is skewed compared with Western Europe and the more secular countries of Eastern Europe: to the left as far as economic and social policy is concerned and to the right in terms of cultural politics.

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However if we consider this shift as a consequence of Solidarity heritage we have to reflect on the second option of analysis after the 2005 elections, that Polish politics are still under the spell of the postcommunist versus Solidarity division. Miroslawa Grabowska, one of the most careful observers of the Polish political scene, argues that both post-communist parties, the SLD (Alliance of the Democratic Left) and the breakaway SDLP (Polish Social Democracy) still managed between them to get almost sixteen per cent of the popular vote, which is not reflected in the constituency of the Sejm because of a five per cent clause. This clause means that the votes for any the parties which got less than five per cent (SDLP got three) are “lost.” Three of the parties represented in the Sejm have post-Solidarity roots; besides the abovementioned there is also the LPR (League of Polish Families), which is radically Catholic and nationalist. So the post-Solidarity camp according to this analysis is split into three parties representing different versions of the “mythologies of Solidarity.”15 Besides all their differences and hostilities these parties have in common the idea of the need to establish relations with the past in such a way that it could stop haunting the present. The intensity of this idea is closely connected with the intensity of the politics of identity, but, for instance, all post-Solidarity parties agree that the archives of the Communist Secret Service should be widely available to the public. All of this constitutes of course a politics of the past. However I do not think that these two analyses have to be contradictory. The past according to the main thesis of this book is interwoven with current politics at various levels. The process of getting rid of the past is a never-ending story and the only possible course is to liberate the present from certain particular pasts, but not from the past in general. So one can imagine a situation in which all the people who were involved in communism will die and the issue will lose its current significance, but even then it can be widely discussed in the context of the legitimization of democracy or the validity of political institutions. Of course in time the problem of the heritage of the communist regime will become more and more eclipsed by new past(s), but in any event it will last as part of the historical narrative of this corner of Europe.

Mechanisms of Exclusion and Inclusion Reference to the past may play an important role in various dimensions of political and social life. It could form group identity by showing the

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common origins of the group. The role of the “myth of origins” was observed by anthropologists and by historians. For instance, Eric Hobsbawm in his seminal book The Invention of Tradition gave a very general meaning to this idea. According to him, “‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”16 He added that also “[R]evolutions and ‘progressive movements’ which break with the past, by definition, have their own relevant past, though it may be cut off at a certain date, such as 1789.”17 Such an invented past thus gives to the group a feeling of identity, and it creates cohesion within the group. It also helps to set in motion the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, which are crucial for the political struggle. Those mechanisms are necessary for the functioning of the political field. The latter assumes always, as Pierre Bourdieu notes, a bipolar division, which has, however, a relative character. Bourdieu describes these features as follows: “The fact that every political field tends to be organized around the opposition between two poles … should not lead us to forget that the recurrent properties of doctrines or groups situated in positions that are polar opposites … are invariants which can be realized only in and through the relation to a given field.”18 The time relation is one of the most important determinants in mapping the position of a party within a certain field. In very general terms, we can divide the field into future- and past-oriented parties which, at least since the French Revolution, has been a clear marker of “left” versus “right” or “progressive” against “conservative” trends. Even if nowadays this scheme has changed as left-wing parties defend the “welfare state’s” past utopia and right-wing ones opt for the “free market” utopia of the future, the principle of division seems to be untouched. A subtler division would reveal a number of differences concerning a rich variety of pasts and futures. Bourdieu observes also that politics is an activity which is contradictory in itself. On the one hand, it assumes a secret knowledge, a kind of expertise not available to laymen; on the other hand, it involves appeals to the public and requires support from ordinary people. This contradiction regularly produces schisms as some participants in the political game seek wider support and prefer it to the purity of ideological principles.19 The idea of a “crucial past” can have important consequences in each of the two dimensions. It sets in motion a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion enabling one to divide the

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political field between “them” and “us,” as well as giving one a feeling of initiation into secret political knowledge. The construction of the past, however, plays an even more important function. It can also be used as a tool to define the structure of the political field. The way in which certain past events become condemned or praised influences heavily what is thinkable and what is unthinkable in current politics. In this sense, the past creates the future as it describes the limits of possibilities for the future political order. However, we have again to deal here with a hermeneutic circle of interpretation. The past is usually reconstructed from the point of view of current political interests which, in turn, arise from expectations of the future and, to some extent, form those expectations. Therefore, it is commonly observed that any struggle for the past is in fact a struggle for the future. A good example of such a standpoint is the remark made by one of the participants in the Historikerstreit (German discussion on the Nazist past): “in a country without history, he who fills the memory, defines the concepts and interprets the past, wins the future.”20 For this reason, countries which are in the process of social transformation are especially susceptible to dramatization of the past. In the previous section of this book I analysed the political and moral dimensions of the discussion of the communist past in post-totalitarian Poland. By showing the various dilemmas of this debate I have attempted to point out that the problem of the relation to things past needs careful conceptual consideration, which can serve as a framework for the interpretations of the past. Two slogans are frequently used in this context, “liberating the future from the past” and “liberating the past from the future.” In the next section of the chapter I would like therefore to make a close reading of these slogans. After discussing the conceptual framework I shall come again to the lives of people involved in politics, always the real substance of political life. I intend to look at the relationship between time and personal life and political responsibility. To this end I will interpret the biographies of former communists and try to find the strategies they employ in justifying their lives and deeds. The next section of the chapter is devoted to the problem of the discussion of civil society in totalitarian and post-totalitarian Poland. The idea of building civil society became the main slogan of the opposition in the eighties. It focused all hopes on the creation the new, ethically transformed society. The failure of the realization of this purpose is one the most important factors in viewing the role of the opposition in the process of transformation. At the end of this chapter I include a section on Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. By doing this I would like to

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emphasize that the problem of the relation to the past is not only a problem of politics but also a problem of culture and art. Lem’s fiction is an important voice in the discussion of the main features of communist society and it deserves special attention from this point of view.

Liberating the Future from the Past: Liberating the Past from the Future In this section I would like to discuss two of the most popular political slogans used in the argument about the past. The first, “liberating the future from the past”, is widely used by proponents of national reconciliation and those who believe that the past can be sent to historians for impartial analysis and that it should be let alone in political discussions. The symmetrical slogan, “liberating the past from the future”, does not, of course, have such explicit political connotations. However, it is a logical consequence of the politics of the past. The future, whatever it could and should be, cannot influence the past, which always has to be a point of reference for political choices.

Liberating the Future from the Past This slogan works on the assumption that the past tends to determine the future. Therefore, the purge of the past opens up a way to heal the future, to restore its innocence. In the case of the transcendental strategy for dealing with the past, discussed earlier, the past has to confront the judgment of absolute values. The application of these values can repair the distorted order and, in a sense, set up a new past-future relationship. In the ontological categories I have introduced, the confrontation with transcendental principles changes the whole geometry of expectations; it changes the field of possible solutions to political problems. Transcendental principles set up their own rationality, which in turn defines the social domain. This purgatory strategy thus consists of creating a new future that will be very different from the future which would have emerged out of the “old” past. This is also the aim of the dialogical strategy. In this case, however, the mechanism of change is different. Instead of applying transcendental principles to the distorted social order, this strategy offers a painful and never-ending process of negotiation. The negotiations have to go on at various levels, from everyday life to the most sophisticated historians’ and philosophers’ discussions. Therefore, the change cannot happen

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immediately; it needs a great amount of time to complete. The new future is not projected but rather penetrates the old one. So for a long time two sets of possibilities exist at the same time, and they struggle for ultimate recognition. In political terms, such a situation gives rise to the “pendulum effect”; the political field is open and it can accommodate different kinds of basic categories. For instance, two kinds of legitimization of the political system can coexist. In Poland after the elections of 1993 when the post-communist party (Social Democracy of the Polish Republic) won, there was a stormy discussion about its right to rule the country. Jerzy Turowicz, editor of the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny and one of the most respected journalists in post-war Poland, noted: “The problem is that the ruling coalition has the democratic legitimization to rule the state but it does not have the moral one. … It does not have the moral one because it never condemned its own past, never broke with the past, never told the truth about the Polish People’s Republic, and about their responsibility for the past.”21 So, in this case, two kinds of legitimization were invoked: a democratic one by virtue of the majority and a moral legitimization by virtue of responsibility for the past. Each kind of legitimization projects its own future. The democratic legitimization assumes a cleavage with the old past, and proposes a political future free from the burden of this past. On the surface we are thus dealing with a past-free future, but the tacit assumption is that both sides (the communists and the opposition) gradually come to terms and forge together the Round Table compromise. The moral legitimization is based on the assumption that there is a strict continuity between the past and the future and that this continuity cannot be severed. This continuity works at the metaphysical level as well as at the empirical level of individual biography. For instance, in the above-quoted article Jerzy Turowicz goes on: Of course collective responsibility is not equally distributed, it depends on when they [former communists] joined the Party and what they did on its behalf. [But it] is not a defendable statement that younger members of the Party who joined it in the last, “softer” period of its activity are not responsible for the past. If they were conscious, active members of the party knowing its history and status in the state and they accepted this party and the communist state then they have no right to avoid the moral responsibility.

Thus, in both kinds of legitimization we have to deal with at least a certain form of dependence of the future upon the past. This dependence is so strong that it can take the form of institutional legitimization. The state apparatus can be set in motion to investigate the past of people and organizations in order to do justice to them. That’s why the question

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arises, in light of the Eastern European experience, whether it is at all possible to separate the past and the future. The situation seems too paradoxical, as many people feel that the close time relation is an obstacle to the development of a “normal” political life. One of the main proponents of reconciliation, Adam Michnik, writes wryly about his experience: [D]ealing with the communist past has divided the participants of the debate into spokesmen for justice and spokesmen for reconciliation. The first demanded the methodical punishment of the guilty parties. The second proposed a process of national reconciliation in the name of future challenges. Both those attitudes at times took on a grotesque form: the first went so far as to demand discrimination against the members of the communist apparatus, the second behaved as if they had forgotten that the past dictatorship ever existed. The formula for which I was a spokesman: “Amnesty – yes, amnesia – no” – turned out to be too difficult for people of the democratic opposition.22

In fact Michnik proposes a kind of ideal version of the politics of the past which can be summarized in the following scheme: evaluation of the past → responsibility for the past → the political consequences. The ideal variant of this connection assumes that there is a consistent logical link between the three dimensions. For instance, negative evaluation of the past entails ascribing the responsibility to a certain person or group of persons, and in turn, this responsibility results in the punishing or limiting the activity of such a group in certain fields of social or political life. Realizing such a scheme presupposes, however, the idealistic assumption of both the responsibilities of people for their biographies and enough memory in a society to control the biographies of others. As these two conditions are hardly met, instead, in political practice, we work rather with a quite different scheme: political consequences evaluation of the past moral consequences. In this sequence, the future is liberated from the past but the past becomes a hostage of the future.

Liberating the Past from the Future The future-oriented concept of social life has been a well known and indispensable part of European thought at least since Plato, and definitely since St Augustine. Plato places his utopia of a just society in timeless, mythological space, whereas St Augustine locates it in the mythological future of parusia. In both cases, however, the actual reality of the political institutions is presented as casual and subordinated to the true reality of essence. Traces of such a style of thinking have been apparent in religious mysticism as well as in a more secularized way in Hegel’s and, above all, Marx’s philosophy of history.23 Surprisingly enough, the

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same tendency has appeared in the democracies in transition. A great amount of the discussion of the past is connected to the employment of things past for current politics in the context of their consequences for the future. People who demand a “radical break” with the past think of the past as an extension of the future. The future cannot take on the demanded form without the radical reconstruction of the past. Therefore, there is a paradoxical connotation implemented in the usage of the slogan “radical break with the past.” The supporters of this statement do not, in fact, ask for forgetting but, on the contrary, focus on the past. They assume that the future that they expect demands a past different from that which really has happened. At a certain level, this tendency can have a purely instrumental dimension. Condemning the past means then a radical change in the political field directed mainly to the elimination of some political groups or individuals from the game. This is the declared purpose of the “decommunization” procedure approved or discussed in East European countries. It is intended to clean up the political field by forbidding people included in certain categories to participate in politics. The tacit assumption of such a procedure is, however, connected with the fulfilling of expectations. The future, which is the content of these expectations, needs a different past-future sequence. In other words, in Ernesto Laclau’s terminology, there is a need for a new contingency of the social.24 In this process the past loses its objectivity and becomes a contingent supplement to the hegemonically defined future. The opposite strategy of stressing the continuity between the past and the future results in the same outcome. On the surface, it gives to the past-future relationship a great deal of objectivity. The past is unchangeable and the politicians have to agree on the consequences involved in this statement. Its most important implication is to deny to the past the force of constituting the political field. It is constituted only by the expectations as to the political shape of the society and its institutions. This refusal of the past acts, of course, in favour of the future because the latter becomes the only power which is able to shape the relationship between the contingent and the objective. The past turns into the “dead past” which has to be thrown away as a domain of pure contingency. The past is contingent because it is by no means attached to the future, which, in this perspective, is a place of objectivity. Therefore, the political strategy resulting from such an understanding of the past-future relation is to “let the past alone.” The past is, thus, sent back to historians and is sentenced to existence only in the archive files.

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Thus in both cases we are dealing with the problem of the past as merely an extension of the future. It seems that this tendency is almost overwhelming in existing societies. This overbalance has two sources. First, it is a feature of contemporary technological societies. It has been frequently noted that such categories as “change,” “novelty,” and “transformation” are favorite words in the vocabulary of these societies and similar words have been popular at least since the French Revolution. Even conservatives and proponents of counterrevolution have had to use this rhetoric to some extent. They have defined change as a return to the sources (the past); but, in fact, they have proposed a radical transformation of society. It is clear that the slogan “return to the past” conveys the same ambiguity as the slogan “break with the past.” In both cases, “the past” is defined in the context of the future; the difference consists in using the past in a positive or a negative way. Second, the future is, as I have tried to show earlier, the locus of human existence. In this sense, the political project is merely an instance of the broader project of making life meaningful. As such, the life project is always directed to the future, So the question arises whether it is at all possible to have a politics which would not be future-oriented. A pragmatic description of action which I accept here puts the stress on the reciprocal interactions between action and the social milieu; then the time structure, which as has been shown produces much of the social environment, does not seem to be a matter of indifference. However, the question remains how it is possible to neutralize the future, to make the relationship between the past and future more balanced. The most obvious answer is to paralyse time. Ernesto Laclau describes this process in his categories as follows: The representation of time as a cyclical succession, common in peasant communities, is in this sense a reduction of time to space. … Through dislocation, time is overcome by space. But while we can speak of the hegemonization of time by space (through repetition), it must be emphasized that the opposite is not possible: time cannot hegemonize anything, since it is a pure effect of dislocation. The ultimate failure of all hegemonization, then, means that the real – including physical space – is in the ultimate instance temporal. 25

I would not, however, restrict this strategy exclusively to peasant communities. This strategy is used also by the most advanced technological societies. Paradoxically, the force which lies behind it is the same force that gives to those societies the impulse of technological progress, namely, free-market competition. Commercialization of holidays imposes an annual cyclic rhythm in such an effective way that in fact the whole life of society is subordinated to it. American writer

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Don DeLillo perfectly grasps this tendency in his novel White Noise. The extremely fluent, paranoid reality of contemporary American social life is counterbalanced by the fixed reality of the American superstore whose offers and displays change according to the seasons of the year. However, this “paralysis of time” strategy has a very limited range. In fact, it is a border case of the situation in which the future dominates the past. The past turns into the quasi-future; it fulfills all of the functions of the future, but its content remains unchanged. Therefore, cyclical time does not open up the way to the real balance between the past and the future. This strategy can produce, at best, an artificial eternity, the illusion of timeless reality. For this reason it does not have any emancipatory potential supporting freedom. It naturally tends to create a radically hegemonic society suppressing all possible alternatives. I have mentioned earlier the other possibility of annulling the future. This is the transcendental strategy, which makes the future merely the exemplification of eternal principles. The time order is apparent from this perspective, as time becomes only an empirical space, which enables the principles to exist in worldly reality. Time has only negative power. The only thing within time which can be done to the principles is their distortion or even destruction. Freedom, as it has been known since Kant, is a logical assumption, which presupposes individual responsibility. This responsibility, in turn, is a logically necessary condition of the empirical power of transcendental principles. Human beings (in fact, any reasonable beings) are supposed to behave according to the principles. Free will is then, as St Augustine had already observed, a source of temptation, a trap rather than a gift. You can use your freedom according to reason or misuse it. When Karl Jaspers speaks about metaphysical guilt, he means the situation of radical misuse of freedom. The transcendental order cannot be distorted. What can be distorted is its empirical influence, the relationship between an individual and Reason. To repair the order one needs to recover the ability to use reason. The transcendental strategy enables people to disregard the time dimension, so it also undermines the tyranny of the future but at the price of giving up any exchange between an individual and his or her social environment. Individuals remain alone, directed by the “light of Reason.” The dialogical option seems to me the best solution for the problem of the balance between the past and the future in the context of securing freedom. I have earlier discussed the problem of dialogue as an indispensable part of the human condition. Instead of the orientation toward the future, dialogism proposes perceiving an individual as a result of conscious interactions with the other. This dialogical

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perspective has two sides. On the one hand, it presupposes, as I have indicated, the timeless, eternal reality of dialogue; on the other, it perceives concrete human action as creative and future-oriented. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, one of the most outstanding proponents of dialogical orientation, sees the relationship between these two sides in the following way: Two worlds confront each other, two worlds that have absolutely no communication with each other and are mutually impervious: the world of culture and the world of life, the only world in which we create, cognize, contemplate, live our lives or die or – the world in which the acts of our activity are objectified and the world in which these acts actually proceed and are actually accomplished once and only once.26

Therefore, any act has a twofold nature; using Bakhtin’s expression, it is like the “two-faced Janus.” On the one hand, it finds its objectivization in the world of culture; on the other, its “never repeatable uniqueness” is realized in the world of life, in “actually lived and experienced life.” These two moments of an act create a whole, a single unity that participates in Being-as-event (sobytie bytiia). An act is also a fulfillment of responsibility; it is a conscious reaction to moral obligations and the moral situation. It is an act of answerability. From this point of view, Bakhtin distinguishes between the content of the act (special answerability) and its Being (moral answerability). Both moments constitute the act as a unique whole, but the first moment, the Being of the act, can be abstracted and presented as an independent and universally valid judgment. The same motive appears also in George Herbert Mead’s social psychology with the distinction between I and me. The self as a me is a web of social interactions whereas I represents a creative character of concrete action. Those two aspects of the self constitute two separate world orders which refer respectively to the past and the future. Both, however, are united in the universal rationality of the moral order. The order of the universe that we live in is the moral order... We are at home in our own world, but it is not ours by inheritance but by conquest. The world that comes to us from the past possesses and controls us. We possess and control the world that we discover and invent. And this is the world of moral order. Thus, it is clear that the universality of the moral order is not given in advance but achieved in the process of action and interactions between individuals.27

Action itself is inevitably future-oriented but its environment, the human, objectified world of culture, can be rationally shaped in a dialogical way. Dialogue allows us to avoid the tyranny of the future as a main factor of social life but, on the other hand, it protects us from the

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empty repetition of cyclic time or subordination to pre-given transcendental principles. The eternity which is a result of dialogue differs from that of transcendental principles. It does not presuppose the ultimate reality of Reason that annuls time. Dialogue turns the relationship between the past and the future into a relationship of logical discourse between conscious and rational human beings. If such a perspective is accepted, then the social ontology ceases to be the ontology of expectations. Instead, it is transformed into the ontology of rational discourse which constitutes the society as a logical relation between events. The core of this ontology is dialogue itself as a set of formal rules of discussion. The content and the rules of discourse are, however, set up at the same time, so that dialogue always transcends its own logical boundaries. Contingency is introduced to the dialogue by the character of action itself, which, as has been said, is unpredictable in concrete situations. Action by its nature challenges the logical, timeless constitution of dialogue. This tension, in turn, opens up the space where contingency encounters logical necessity. The possibility of freedom is an implication of this encounter.

The Politics of Political Biography: Self-realization, Loyalty, and Political Change Philosophy of Existence and Political Biographical Narratives As a philosopher entering the terrain of anthropology of politics I feel, before starting an analysis of political biographies, the necessity to explain the task and main ideas of my enterprise. My intention is to combine the following three approaches to the problem of such biography: philosophical, political and anthropological. Each of them has its own particularities, which explains why – while focusing on their overlap – I have to specify these different standpoints. I intend to start with some very general remarks concerning the problem of political (auto)biography and the relationships between biography and political responsibility. Next, starting from the philosophical theories of Heidegger, Tugendhat and Bakhtin, I would like to establish the most general categories useful for the description of the political biographical genre. I have chosen those specific philosophical theories in order to relate the existential dimension of the political biography to the social settings of human life. From this point of view the above mentioned

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theoreticians seem to provide a profound insight into this relationship. Heidegger’s theory includes categories which convey the uniqueness of individual existence. Bakhtin’s dialogical concept of the self denotes a complicated network of reciprocal relations between the individual and the other. Tugendhat attempts to combine Heidegger’s existentialism with the social theory of Mead and Wittgenstein.28 Using categories derived from the above-mentioned theories I will analyse the relations between the construction of narrative in political biographies, the attempts by politicians to represent their life as meaningful and (often, but not always) their justification of political actions. First, I distinguish typical forms of political narratives. Second, I focus on several biographies and autobiographies that reconstruct the life of four Polish former nomenklatura members. In my analyses I use categories which I deem to be counterparts of the philosophical vocabulary employed in the first part of this discussion.

Politics and Autobiography One of the most striking consequences of the systemic transition in posttotalitarian countries is the place ascribed to the problem of biography. The significance of the problem seems obvious. If the political field is not a field of struggle between depersonalized powers, then the problem of individual responsibility is bound to come to the fore. Biography understood as a locus of responsibility is put to the test of coherence, integrity, and moral and political validity. This, however, entails many theoretical and practical questions. First, it is unclear and ambiguous what in fact political biography means. Even if we accept the narrative character of biography, we have to consider the different perspectives involved. For instance, the question of thin and thick description is revealed to be not merely epistemological but also an important political issue. Thick description can mean justification of political choices from “inside,” with the context of a decision being more important than the consequences thereof. Thin description does not entail such implication, especially if it is combined with the idea of moral responsibility. In the political reality of a post-totalitarian country both modes of description clash against each other and acquire distinct political meanings.29 Another problem is connected with the relation between political biography and political events. Political biography can be defined as a reflection of politics, necessitating a strict parallelism between life-story and political evolution. The human agent is then presented as a response

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to the demands of particular political struggles and his/her life is defined as an activity. The loosening of this relation allows for a private biographic component, in which case we have two sets of events which should be harmonized: public and private choices. Regarded from this perspective, the ethical evaluation results from comparison between these two lines of choices. Second, the concept of biography implies the existence of a subject or an acting agent. Typically, this assumption is very often questioned in the modern humanities, which treat biographical (and autobiographical) narratives as constructions rather than as descriptions of objective or psychological reality.30 Yet, if we move on to the political realm then we are bound to confront a paradox: on the one hand we have to deal with moral responsibility as the main principle of politics, while on the other, we face the idea of the disappearing subject which now prevails in the humanities. This problem can be considered from both angles. In the political public field the acting subject is the political subject, a construction reducing the whole subject (human agent) to the single function of decision making in the political field, with other qualities – love, family life, personal relations – seen as relatively unimportant. When analysing political biographies, we have to specify whether we are discussing the public actor or the whole human being. One option is to view political choices as disguised personal preference. Should we make this assumption, we run the risk of giving up any personal responsibility, which is deconstructed as unimportant and contingent. Yet this claim would be counter-intuitive to the experience of people involved in politics, and would also go against the sense of justice of millions of ordinary people who suffered under totalitarian regimes. Thirdly, it is necessary to specify our focus when analysing political biographies. We can focus on the personal perspective of the person in question, or instead take an external point of view, and thus inspect biography from the point of view of the other. The issue becomes complicated if we take into account the assumed reflection of a biography in the eyes of the others, and vice versa, i.e., the beliefs of people (who suffered under the totalitarian regime) concerning the way in which politicians reflected their expectations. If we define political biography as a locus of political choices it is also – and indeed predominantly – a locus of existential decisions. From this point view, the most important approach is the Heideggerian one, along with several variants. Here I will focus on the study of Tugendhat which is devoted to the problem of self-description and self-consciousness. Tugendhat accepts the Heideggerian argument that the relationship to our

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own biographies is one of the most important points in analysing the ontological status of human existence: “Existing authentically means existing in the mode of self-determination.”31 Granted this approach, the most important thing for the authenticity of existence becomes its openness to the Heideggerian Dasein, which is why the analysis of biography needs to be focused on the ability to pursue “projects” in the course of life, and answer the challenge of death. In this approach the most important feature is the relation of oneself to oneself, which finds its ultimate expression in answering “yes” or “no” to (particular experiences in) one’s own life. Answering “yes” or “no” to the history of our life also has important political consequences. In my view biography is a point of juncture of philosophical, ethical, psychological and political questions. Notably, even philosophers like Tugendhat, who at least partly follow Heidegger, find it necessary to supplement the relation of oneself to oneself by attaching the social factor to it. Tugendhat himself fulfils this task by using G.H. Mead’s idea of the social self as a consequence of taking the role of the other, also expressed by Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogical self. By including the social factor in the study of biographies, the reception of changes in life values in the eyes of the other, and the selfperception of these changes through the eyes of the other, become the main objects of analysis. Biography is thus concentrated around three important issues: selfrealization (project), values (moral space), and external pressure (situation). Therefore, I will ask questions pertaining to these dimensions in order to arrive at the general position of accepting one’s own activity and, in the most general terms, saying “yes” or “no” to life. The material I use for this purpose consists mainly of interviews and memoirs of members of the nomenklatura and former dissidents. After the collapse of the communist regime Poland saw a flood of interviews and recollections of people formerly in power who were eager to present their own version of historical events and to justify their own roles in those events.32 In fact such a tendency had been observed earlier in Teresa Toranska’s famous interviews, yet this trend as a large social phenomenon appeared only after 1989.33 Seeing the confessions of former communists utilized in public, we are faced with yet another dimension of the politics of biography, namely the use of biography as a weapon in ongoing political struggle. The striking feature of these confessions is their high degree of standardization or ritualization. The texts usually contain a declaration of good will by the writer or interviewee, blame is ascribed to his or her

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political opponents, and a bright vision is sketched of the future which could have come true if the writer/ interviewee had not been deprived of power. Despite this façade character, the confessions (usually in the form of an interview conducted by a trusted journalist) present a very interesting example of self-justification, and the main research problem is to discriminate the rhetoric that justifies decisions.34 The most popular types of narratives employed in political biographical constructions are those which: (1) define continuity of biography and loyalty to the same set of values as an expression of integrity and authenticity, (2) stress continuity of biography by showing loyalty to certain values while changing others, (3) reformulate biography in terms of changing an entire set of values, (4) introduce rifts in the biography. The first strategy consists in showing that a person’s whole life was devoted to pursuing the same purpose or values. It is often used both by dogmatic communists and by devoted dissidents. They insist that, despite changing circumstances, they were able to preserve integrity and consistency in a specific pattern of behaviour. The trouble with this type of narrative consists in its very vague criteria for integrity. Even a Stalinist as dedicated as Kazimierz Mijal – who in the sixties fled from Poland to Albania and then to China to set up a genuine Marxist Polish Communist Party – had to collaborate in the late fifties and the early sixties with Gomulka, whom he considered a repulsive revisionist. The case of Wojciech Jaruzelski is even more complicated. In his biography, he emphasizes his life-long integrity, i.e. from the moment in Siberia when he shed aristocratic illusions and converted to socialism.35 However, he in fact adopted a very flexible attitude, and changed his behaviour depending on the circumstances. For instance, during the period of Martial Law he stressed that “We will defend socialism as much as we defend independence,” and after the changes his usual line of defense was the threat of Soviet intervention. In both cases he underlined patriotic involvement as his main motive of activity. Edward Gierek in a biographical interview presented himself as an agent of Poland’s modernization. Gierek combined this with a rhetoric of historical materialism with its stress on the forces of production. For him the collaboration with Western countries was justified as an effort to develop the Polish economy, which was to result in advanced socialism. This impoverished version of an ethic of authenticity is now a common strategy of former nomenklatura members, especially among the older generation. They claim to have always frankly believed in the ideals, and they are not visibly ashamed of their past. This logic of intentions and motives provides enough justification for their behaviour.

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The younger generation (a good example is Stanislaw Ciosek, who masterminded the Round Table Agreement) presents its commitment to socialism in purely technical terms, claiming that they was just doing politics – regarded as a mysterious esoteric activity, controlling ordinary people’s behaviour. In this sense they maintain that politics is an inevitable part of any society, irrelevant of the model of political organization. The second narrative type is in fact a weaker version of the first, and people who use the first usually employ the second one as well, oscillating between the two. This strategy is typical of those who have changed their views, while insisting on a claim for personal integrity. Yet it is mainly used by former members or supporters of the Party who turned into dissidents or critics of Party politics. They claim fixed devotion to the ideals of equality, social justice and progress, arguing that when it turned out that “real socialism” failed to realize these values, they became increasingly oppositional. An interesting phenomenon is that the same kind of strategy is employed by other groups of people who now support the post-communist orientation in political life. Both groups have their roots in the post-Stalinist revisionist movement that finally split at the beginnings of the eighties. One group opposed the communist regime and supported Solidarity, while the other rejected Solidarity, perceiving it as embodiment of conservative forces in Polish society. In the first group we see such people as Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, in the second Jerzy Urban and Daniel Passent. These people were once all enlightened revisionist Marxists, and the parting of their ways resulted from different interpretations of their earlier political convictions. There are, however, also people who declared themselves to have gone through a profound change in their lives. The latter declared that much of their former activity was a mistake or a sin. These people used these religious metaphors even though they were mainly atheist.36 I divide these people into two groups. The first group maintain that they reformulated all their value guidelines, and tried to introduce a new order in their lives. They were born again, recognizing their earlier acts as entirely alien to what they did afterwards. The best example of such an attitude is Stefan Staszewski, a devoted communist who radically changed his mind at some point. He confessed in his conversation with Toranska that: 37 he [his friend Zambrowski] couldn’t cross … the Rubicon and say to himself: I am not a communist; my program, the program I believed in, has not been realized and will not be

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realized. I’m pleased to say that I wasn’t afraid to cross that Rubicon, knowing all the consequences and implications of such a step. Perhaps that was partly a result of my character, or perhaps of the imagination I possess, but at any rate I did say to myself, at one point, I am not a communist.

But Staszewski seems inconsistent in presenting the causes and consequences of his giving up communism. On the one hand, he claims that at some point he ceased to believe in the possibility of realizing the communist utopia. On the other hand, he remarks: “A communist is someone who has absolute faith in the party, which means that his faith in it is uncritical at every stage, no matter what the party is saying.”38 In the first sense, giving up communism means acknowledging the failures of communism as a political program and becoming dissatisfied with its politics, in the second it means giving up faith, while suggesting that conversion to a new faith is possible. In fact Staszewski himself passed through these two stages. At the end of his life he decided to be baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. One of the most striking features of political biographical narratives is their embeddedness in the present. Understandably, this is an implication of constructing such biographical narratives. They, ex definicione, are always a kind of retrospect, an explanation of the past for the present. Yet this peculiarity brings about consequences for both dimensions of the political biography, i.e., the political and the existential one. As a political event the autobiography is always a strategy for rewriting life for the present. The most trivial case is when we deal only with the justification of former politics and/or ideological declaration of professing the same beliefs, as is often the case with retired politicians. In the next part of this book I will analyse the narrative connections between past and present events. It is, however, remarkable how strongly retired politicians seek to excuse their activity. These excuses take different forms, such as references to individual morality (“I have always been honest”) or to others’ personal failures (“My opponents made mistakes which resulted in the collapse of the communist system”). The narrative constructions may be even more complicated when politicians are still active in the political field or in any other kind of social activity, and when their autobiographies also attempt to justify present political activities. For instance, Stanislaw Ciosek prolonged his career in the new Poland by serving as an Ambassador to Moscow under successive Solidarity and post-communist governments. In his narrative he stresses the technical character of his political activity, claiming that his motivation was always to find a solution to particular problems, and not to further ideological purposes.

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The Narratives In this part of the section my paper I would like to present the categorical analysis of a number of autobiographical narratives of people involved in Polish politics under communism. The four persons, Kazimierz Mijal, Edward Gierek, Albin Siwak and Stanislaw Ciosek, represent four different attitudes of former members of the Polish nomenklatura. Kazimierz Mijal belongs to the group of historical leaders of Polish communists. He took important political positions in the forties and fifties, and in the sixties distanced himself from the revisionist politics of Wladyslaw Gomulka. He founded his own Polish Communist Party, emigrated to Albania, and then moved to China. He came back to Poland in the eighties. Edward Gierek was First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party from 1970 to 1980. Before that he was the leader of a local party unit in Upper Silesia, the most industrial region of Poland. As Party First Secretary he tried to modernize Poland by means of Western loans and technology. He was replaced after massive strikes, which paved the way for the Solidarity movement. Albin Siwak was presented in the eighties as a Party alternative to Lech Walesa. Siwak was a construction worker, employed for many years as a foreman. In the eighties he was elected to the Politburo of the Communist Party and became famous as an opponent of Solidarity. Stanislaw Ciosek represents a younger generation of the nomenklatura. He was active in the youth movement, and afterwards he occupied several important party positions. In 1980 he was appointed minister for relations with the new trade unions, and in 1989 he masterminded the Round Table Agreement. In the nineties he was Polish Ambassador in Moscow. In 1995 he started an initiative to postpone presidential elections in the name of national reconciliation as well as to allow President Lech Walesa another two years. He was dismissed but later offered a post as a special adviser on foreign affairs to President Aleksander Kwasniewski.39 This categorical analysis follows the theoretical considerations of the first part of the book. The first question concerns the construction of integrity and coherence in biography, analysing the role of the project in life. The more integral a life is in perception, the more powerful is the project as a regulator of behaviour. The second question focuses on the construction of notions of success and failure, locating the project in a moral space, since it closely connects the system to existence in the sense of the Heideggerian Dasein. The third looks at the external situation as a frame for action. In the context of the above-mentioned biographies the

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most important external circumstances were the international political pressures. Consequently, the analysis focuses on the ways in which the biographers represent and interpret Soviet politics and its impact on the Polish political situation, as well as its impact on the personal political choices made by the four selected members of the nomenklatura. Focusing on the construction of coherence and incoherence in the four biographies the following remarks can be made.40 Kazimierz Mijal sees clear connections between the beginnings of his political performance and his later activities. Mijal comes from a peasant background, and was the eighteenth child in his family. His mother, he argues, stressed the necessity of learning, seeing it as the only way to well-being. In his autobiography, he describes his devotion to learning, and to Marxism as a scientific theory of social development, as a result of his upbringing. He regards his political activity as a direct fulfilment and embodiment of scientific Marxism, which explains his hard-line position within the communist party and his rejection of compromises. There is another reason for emphasizing Mijal’s scientific interpretation of his political activity. Following the impoverished version of Marxism that prevailed in the Soviet camp, he always pays attention to the class background of his enemies. For instance, he insists that Gomulka was never a real worker but merely a craftsman.41 Edward Gierek emphasizes his personal experience as the most important factor in developing his political views. First, his workingclass background enabled him – he says – to encounter all the ills of the capitalist system. As a young man he emigrated and worked in French and Belgian mines. His personal experience in the West was an important factor in his obsession with the modernization of Communist Poland. Albin Siwak emphasizes his involvement in activity first as a construction worker and later as a foreman. He became the head of a working unit as a relatively young man, at the age of eighteen. His book is full of lyrical accounts of how he helped the people he was in charge of. He advised his workers not only in their work but also in their love affairs, legal problems and everyday life. Hereby he presents his political activity as a very personal involvement, and stresses that he openly spoke about the failures of the communist regime. He also mentions his involvement as a high Party bureaucrat in big politics – although in quite a peculiar manner. The book contains a story about Siwak’s friend from the Secret Police who informed him of secret events. He told Siwak about a Jewish plot to overthrow Gomulka and provided Siwak with crucial information at the most important and dangerous moments of his political career.

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Stanislaw Ciosek, who is significantly younger than the other three and who represents a different generation of Polish nomenklatura, gives a distinct account of the meaning of his political career. For him politics is a form of expression of a wider phenomenon of vita activa: “People who want something more than a worm-like existence must at some point get involved in politics.” He claims that in the beginning he was just an active student successfully running a students’ club. At some point his activity was noticed by “priests”, as he refers to those who initiate others into the arcane sphere of politics. Therefore, when he was invited to join the Party, he agreed because under the current circumstances it was the only possible way to be active. For him being a politician is just a technical activity directed at fulfilment of the tasks determined by preexisting situations. To underline this point, he recurrently refers to the Polish novel Faraon (“The Pharaoh”) by Boleslaw Prus, describing the political techniques and systems of ancient Egypt, comparing these to the modern Polish bureaucratic state. For him to rule is to be introduced into a secret circle of the highest bureaucrats (“priests”). Pierre Bourdieu makes an interesting observation about the political field. He states that there are inevitable tensions within it which give rise to constant reformulations of its structure. First, there is a permanent struggle to design a language for a dominant description of the social world. Second, there is a tendency to divide the political field into two parts, so as to clearly define the friend and the enemy. Third, politics is an activity which is contradictory in itself. On the one hand it assumes secret knowledge, a kind of expertise not available to laymen, while on the other hand it must appeal to the public, and it partly depends on the support of ordinary people. This contradiction produces regular schisms as some participants in the political game seek wider support and prefer personal support to the purity of ideological principles. In the context of the politics of political biography the question which seems to bring together all three items of Bourdieu’s approach is that of failure and success. A focus on personal definitions and evaluations of failure and success provides a link between people’s existence and their political life. Remarkably, all four politicians discussed here stress their independence from the political field. Gierek claims that in crucial political moments he was always ready to go back to work in the mines. This readiness gave him a feeling of independence which eventually turned out to be advantageous in the political game. Mijal also stresses his courage and autonomy in political manoeuvres: “I have never been a puppet of somebody else. If I did not agree I always

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declared it in public.” The final proof of his autonomy was the setting up of a new party (the Polish Communist Party) when he recognized that he couldn’t go further along Gomulka’s revisionist lines. Siwak stresses his determination to make even the most difficult issues public. He claims that at Party meetings he never agreed to read official speeches prepared by hack writers. In this sense he argues that he was always loyal to the working class. Siwak also tries to convince the readers that communism was the optimal expression of national interests, and that a great part of its failure was due to Jewish and capitalist conspiracies. From this point of view he appreciates Gomulka as the most patriotic politician. Ciosek, as mentioned above, conceives of politics in purely instrumental terms, but still emphasizes the need for relative independence. It is interesting to note that he and Gierek underwent serious illnesses during the periods of their political activity. Both declared that this was a crucial existential experience which gave them a chance to view politics from a certain distance. In their own views, they were successful at the level of selffulfilment, but in fact they failed as politicians. Their ideals were not accepted and they were wiped from the political field. In the most general terms of Marxist ideology, they have to confirm its bankruptcy, but each of them defines his relationship to Marxism differently. Ciosek, the only one among them still active in politics, claims that he always had reservations about official ideology. He mentions that back in the eighties, when asked by Russian politicians about the number of communists in Poland, he answered “none.” He defines himself as a socialist and not a communist. His answer to the question of when he ceased to use the term socialism is “at the moment when it was no longer necessary to bring Poland out of poverty in a socialist way.” Socialism never worked properly (“it was an illusion that if everything is common property, people will work better”), so a change of option was inevitable. It is often observed that Marxist politics was the most ideological kind in human history. The Russian Revolution was conducted under slogans such as “fulfilling the laws of history” and “realizing the scientific construction of society”. From this point of view it is interesting to look at the ideological background of the four communist politicians discussed here and their attitude to the Soviet Union. It is a test of their distance from official ideology, using Bourdieu’s ideas about the inevitability of schisms in the political field, and the divisions between the orthodox views that emphasize ideological purity and the moderate standpoints that seek to include as many supporters as

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possible. I would like to trace this cleavage in their political biographies. Notably, the losers in an internal Party struggle for power, Mijal and Siwak, emphasize most emphatically their loyalty to the official ideology. They give, however, quite different reasons for this loyalty. Siwak represents the plebeian type of Marxism which in fact is not Marxism at all but a rather ambiguous mixture of populist views and a derelict impoverished interpretation of Marx’s teaching. The most important feature of this ideology is a strong concept of equality. Siwak himself is very proud that when he was a member of the highest ranks of the party and head of a working unit, he used to prepare coffee and tea for his subordinates. Mijal stresses his commitment to scientific Marxism, always referring to the laws of history and trying to show their confirmation in recent history. Regarding the future of communism, Mijal (in 1997) said: “Feudalism disappeared, and capitalism will also disappear. This is a logic of historical development. Polish politicians are still afraid of the working class. This is the reason why they are so anxious to join NATO.” From this point of view internationalism is very important and Mijal in his biography emphasizes the need to counteract Polish nationalism. This was one of the main reasons for his critique of Gomulka’s politics. In his life he found different vehicles of historical necessity. At the beginning of his political career it was the Soviet Union, then Albania, and eventually the People’s Republic of China. Siwak, on the contrary, was always loyal to Soviet Russia and maintained good relationships with his Russian comrades. Almost all his summer holidays he spent in the Crimea together with the highest dignitaries of the communist world where he met people not only from the Soviet Union but from all communist countries. During these visits he had many opportunities to discuss things with the Russians. They criticized the political situation in Poland, objecting to the ideological weakness of the Polish Communist Party. For instance, his comrades noted that the official name of the Party was the Polish United Workers’ Party and they asked Siwak: “why haven’t you even been able to give a proper name to your Party?” The Russians, Siwak says, always liked him for being a real worker. They believed that he preserved a class instinct which other activists had lost. He is proud that he was more appreciated in the Soviet Union than by other Polish communists, even those of higher rank. Gierek and Ciosek are more sceptical about the Soviet Union. Gierek stresses his connection with the West and in fact his declared purpose was to modernize Poland and make it more Western. However, he does

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not seem able to see the further consequences of his policies. He meticulously enumerates various economic achievements of Poland under his leadership, but never tries to analyse the economic background of the crisis in 1980–81. The only moment of reflection in the interview concerns the failure of introducing higher prices for food in 1976, which turned out to be a crucial point in his political career. Gierek explains that the system of prices was absurd from the point of view of any economic rationality, so the political authorities decided to correct it. People rejected the new system of prices and the massive riots at Ursus near Warsaw and in Radom marked the beginning of the decline of Gierek’s power. Answering how such an absurd system could function for decades, Gierek simply says, “It was a paradox that in spite of that the country could develop and people become richer. It is not a stupid assumption that everything should be steered centrally, but the conditions are that the centre must be a very advanced computer and that people will not try constantly to cheat the centre.” In fact Gierek supposes that the majority of people would have accepted the new prices and it was only the intrigues of his fellows at the top of the Party that caused his failure. Consequently he still seems to believe that it would have been possible to modernize Poland without making significant economic changes. Therefore his attitude towards the Soviet Union is ambivalent. On the one hand, he was anxious to get more independence as a leader of Poland; on the other, he was fixed on the communist dogma. For this reason he accepted the special relationship with the Soviet Union, even though with some reluctance. For Ciosek the relationship with the Soviet Union, like everything else, was just a matter of doing politics. In fact, he was a forerunner of the younger generation of communist politicians, best exemplified by Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, president from 1995 to 2005, characterized by a technical approach to social life and a belief in pure manipulation rather than any kind of ideology. Their relationship to the Soviet Union was that of fear rather than ideological commitment. Commenting on a stormy discussion in Poland about possible Soviet intervention, Ciosek tells about the decision concerning Afghanistan, revealed by a Russian expert who claimed that he saw a written note. It was just a sheet of paper with a short handwritten inscription: “As to A. yes,” and three signatures: representing the Party, the Army and the Security Service. It was signed at Brezhnev’s dacha. Ciosek says that he and his top Party colleagues were sure that a similar decision about Poland could have been taken at any time.

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Conclusion: The Politics of Existence and the Feeling of Responsibility Doing politics is a special kind of activity which has been widely commented on and evaluated in modern thought. This activity comprises, as Machiavelli observed at the beginning of the modern era, two different capacities. On the one hand, it is aimed at the sheer manipulation of people, and therefore skill in this art is an indispensable part of a politician’s endowment. On the other hand, however, politics is a place for self-fulfilment, a heroic activity by which man can transcend his limits and change his society. The balance between these two sides of politics has been the main issue for assessing the results achieved by politicians. In the narratives presented here the assessment seems clear, not to say trivial. All of these politicians in a double sense lost their game. Their ideology failed and they were not able to defend their values. The process of transformation revealed all the crimes, mistakes, failures and absurdities of the former regime. Yet what Mijal, Gierek, Siwak, and Ciosek have in common is a certain kind of self-satisfaction and selfconfidence. They present their activity as a success and claim to have a high level of integrity in their attitudes to the ongoing events. They blame the external situation for their political failure, and try to justify the decisions they made when they were in power. The outcome of their activities seems thus not to have had a decisive influence on the self-evaluation of these politicians’ existence. It is existence itself that plays a decisive role in their public acceptance of their life history. The categories elaborated in the first part of this chapter: self-realization (project), values (moral space), and external pressure (situation). reveal that this self-realization “project” is a decisive factor in politicians’ lives. It is so decisive that, in fact, it suppresses any other points of reference, and makes existence in itself a self-referential entity. I started by questioning the relations between political biography and responsibility. The Polish nomenklatura’s biographies suggest that the most important way in which people construct an image of personal political responsibility is through narratives of loyalty to one’s own project: people are happy if they can feel they have preserved the original sense of their activity throughout their lives. Their politics of existence is existence itself.

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Civil Society as an Ethical Challenge Introduction. The Idea of Civil Society in Eastern Europe and in the West Arguably, the recovery of the idea of civil society has been connected with the significance of this concept during the years of struggle against the totalitarian communist regime. The idea of establishing a network of non-governmental organizations, which might at that time have seemed obsolete in modern capitalist society, showed its power in confrontation with the totalitarian state. The triumph of the revolutions in Eastern Europe showed that the opposition’s strategy was effective. The creation of institutions which were independent of the state marked the limits of the state’s intervention into social life. This in turn was be a deadly blow for the communist ideology, which was largely based on the assumption that the state should control all spheres of social reality. The universalization of this policy was to lead the idea of civil society as an alternative to the state not only in situations of totalitarian oppression but also in liberal, representative democracy and a freemarket economy. This shift coincided with the general critique of the state as a threatening power which always tended to subordinate the individual to its own autonomous purposes. Such a critique, which found its best expression in the work of Michel Foucault, had to lead to a consideration of alternative strategies for the organization of social life. Paradoxically, the liberals, on the other side of the political spectrum, also saw the danger of the growing power of the state and referred to the idea of civil society in order to create a sphere relatively free from state intervention. Jürgen Habermas, in his influential book on the public sphere, opened up the debate about to what extent networks of organizations free from governmental control could exist in contemporary society.42 For both sides involved in the debate, the idea of civil society offered a chance to overcome the seemingly inevitable gap between the organization of social life and the demand for the free expression of an individual’s needs. The concept of the public sphere is to a great extent a utopian project, which was a postulate of liberalism existing only in limited form. As a postulate, civil society has always played an important role as a regulative idea which allows people to assess the boundaries of state intervention. In Eastern Europe the slogan of civil society used by the democratic opposition served a different purpose. The unrestricted power of the state was both a postulate of the doctrine as well as a political reality. Civil society was to be a cure but also an ideological and political

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response to the communist state’s claims to unlimited control over individuals. However, in order to show the roots of the popularity of this concept we have to turn for a moment to the history of communist ideology.

Communism and the Public Sphere. Ideology and Reality Communism in Poland as well as in other Eastern European countries led to the total absorption of the public sphere by the state apparatus. This happened in the political and the ideological dimensions. Communist ideology adapted almost the whole field of traditional thinking, reformulating it in collective terms. In the fight against “bourgeois” ideology, stress was put on the deficiencies of the concept of individualism as a useful tool for understanding and organizing social reality. Instead, communist ideology proposed a collective solution which was embodied in the idea of the Communist Party. The Party then became a political incarnation of collectivist ideology. As Ken Jowitt emphasizes, the communist party had a mixture of modern and premodern features, which helped it to accommodate some strata of society, especially the peasantry, which still adhered to a traditional style of life. Jowitt concludes that “[T]he distinctive quality of Leninist organization is the enmeshment of status (traditional) and class (modern) elements in the framework of an impersonal-charismatic organization.”43 The collectivist ideology thus took on in political practice the form of “familization” of the Party, that is, “the routinization of a charismatic organization in a traditional direction.”44 At the empirical level of everyday life and the political and economic constitution of communist society, the collectivist ideology degenerated into a constant struggle between different cliques and interest groups.45 Although this situation did not disturb the official ideology of collectivism to any remarkable extent, it made this ideology unattractive to the majority of people. In responding to this collectivist ideology, the underground movement had to put emphasis on the value of individualism. In fact it reflected, at least to some extent, the experience of millions of people. One of the paradoxes of social life under the communist government was that people did not trust any service that the government provided. People learned how to behave in a no-man’s-land between state-organized social life and the demands of their personal situations. So everybody had to have a lot of individual initiative to survive but the problem was that it was an initiative restricted to the conditions of existing social institutions. People in Poland, especially in the seventies, became “shameless” liberals

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symptomatically, though completely unaware of it. But it was also clear that the communist ideology was right in this respect, that an individual cannot survive without the help of others. Contrary to the official ideology, however, these others were drawn from the individual’s closest social milieu: friends and family. Collectivism appeared at the premodern level of “natural ties” of kinship and locality, thus crossing the lines of the political divisions.46 Using Jowitt’s categories one can say that while official life was a mixture of pre-modern and modern elements, the everyday life of people remained at the level of pre-modern relationships. Individualism thus was limited by these circumstances and in fact at all levels of society the collectivist ideology triumphed. What then was the distinctive feature that distinguished official collectivism from the private, everyday one? It was trust.47 People had a clear idea that they could trust their friends and family members, but they were in a relation of calculated interest to the official world. So, we had a situation of almost symmetrical division between the two spheres, divided by distinct cohesion mechanisms. On the one hand, official collectivism degenerated into clique-like struggles for power and economic favors. On the other hand there was the private-public sphere organized by personal trust. I use the oxymoronic “private-public” phrase on purpose here, to emphasize that although this sphere was founded on the virtue of private, often family, ties, it had to play the function of expressing public opinion. This was expressed in the truncated, distorted form of political gossip, jokes, and stories repeated from person to person. One of the most interesting (and never sufficiently investigated) issues in communism is the interaction of these two spheres. On the surface, they ignored each other, but there were interventions on both sides. Political jokes were very often fabricated at party headquarters or by secret police agents as parts of internal struggles within the power apparatus. On the other hand, the rulers had, at least to some extent, to take “public opinion” into account and to manipulate it.

The Emergence of Solidarity and the Restoration of Trust When, in August 1980, Polish workers went on strike, it soon became obvious that the issue was much more important than obtaining better conditions of life and work. The worker’s protest started with the postulates about higher salaries and other benefits, but in a wider sense it involved the rejection of the communist state as the legitimate representative of the working class. Lacking any substantial democratic

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validity, communism was bound to refer to Marxist eschatology as the ultimate justification of the social and political order. This kind of justification was very far from social praxis and the working class was conceived as a theoretical construct rather than an empirical reality of life in the factories or in the industrial suburbs. However, the ideologues of the communist state constantly tried to establish the link between political power and the working class. Rejecting this historical legitimization, the workers set in motion what in Ernesto Laclau’s terms could be described as a chain of equivalents. Different demands found their common denominator in the opposition to the existing regime. Ken Jowitt described the significance of Solidarity in the following way: Solidarity is the most powerful and consequential liberal democratic revolution since the French Revolution. A striking illustration of the ironical, not dialectical nature of historical development, Solidarity was a liberal democratic revolution carried out by a working, not a middle, class; a working class created by an anti-liberal Leninist party and nurtured by an anti-liberal Roman Catholic church.48

Jowitt is right if we consider the form of the Solidarity movement. It far transcended the communist system of institutions and had inevitably to clash with the communist state. Solidarity showed that the strategy of cooption did not work any more, and thus “[the] inclusion of social forces was no longer an adequate strategy to maintain the Party monopoly.”49 However, if we have a look at the content of the worker’ demands, especially the so-called “economic demands,” i.e., those which were stated before the “politicization” of Gdansk’s strikes, we find quite a different image. The workers asked for some bureaucratic favors, and they expected to get them from the state as a sign of the “good will” of the communists. This attitude was justified by the geopolitical situation of Poland at that time, with the polarization of the world into two competing political camps. In those circumstances that shaped this self-limiting revolution, Solidarity had to find its purpose in the ethical sphere. As it could not develop any political program which would result in the seizure of power, it had to concentrate on the moral dimension of political and social life. In other words, the values until then restricted to the private (or as I have called it the private-public) sphere were to emerge as values accepted in the official sphere of governmental politics and administration. The most striking example of this ethical attitude was the debate over economic matters. The official standpoint of Solidarity at that time was to promote self-management of the units of the economy. Workers were supposed to have a decisive influence on creating both the policy of their factory and

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its governing body. This idea, of course far from any liberal programs, was to some extent tactical, as tnobody could the have predicted the collapse of the communist state. In such a situation self-management in the economy seemed to be the first step, still acceptable to the state, to a free-market economy. However, I do not think that this idea was developed only for the sake of diplomacy. This idea had an ethical dimension, connected with the whole issue of the ethic of work and ethic of solidarity. Jan Rulewski, referring to a sermon by Father Jozef Tischner, declared at the First Congress of Solidarity an ethical vision of the economy: I dream of an enterprise … in which the worker, the official, the engineer are owners of this enterprise and that on top of that they run it. Because there is a difference proved by the political experience of our state, that in so far as our friend helps us he rules to some extent in our country, which is not the same as if we were to run the country ourselves. That is why we must create a situation in which factory property would be divided up and returned to the workpeople of that factory according to the length of service put in. This would be an irrevocable act which would be a safeguard against conflict … This obligates not only the workforce, but obligates families and creates a new model of culture in our society.50

The economy thus was to express the moral values appreciated in the private lives of the people. Trust and justice should lead social reform and penetrate all spheres of social and political activity. This ethical dimension involved Solidarity in a double stance. On the one hand, it had to carry out the “normal” functions of a trade-union organization fighting for the rights of workers. On the other hand, Solidarity had to be an example of an ethically motivated association whose task was to implement certain values in the hostile environment of a communist state. This discrepancy influenced all dimensions of the movement. Solidarity, as constituted in 1980, presented a patchwork of different political orientations unified by an agreement as to the ethical values expressed in the name of the union. For that reason, Solidarity abandoned the traditional branch scheme of organization of the trade union movement, which would lead to the partition of the union, and adopted instead a model in which only regional, not professional or occupational, divisions were permitted. This model of organization, as well as the name itself, was to emphasize a deep unity grounded in ethical values. The most important set of values adhered to the problematic of national identity. Solidarity was perceived by most people involved in the movement as another embodiment of the Polish struggle for independence, the continuation of a long tradition. This mood was

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ingenuously expressed in the statement that “recovering national identity and dignity” was to become the main task of Solidarity, more important than creating a free-market economy or a socially just society. This task was even considered more important than the building of a democratic society. The nation, understood as a set of values closely connected with the teachings of the Catholic Church, was supposed to play the decisive function in organizing the society. Instead of searching for compromise in the political sphere, Poles were to uncover hidden and partly forgotten values and base their agreement on them. Walesa’s famous remark at the end of 1980 strikes – “we really come to terms as Pole with Pole” was a simple formulation of such an ideology.51

The Importance of Solidarity for the Restoration of the Idea of Civil Society The special role of Solidarity in the communist bloc as well as in the West had two sources. First, Solidarity attained the furthest development of the strategy of the democratization of a communist regime. In confrontation with the oppressive regime strategies directed at a radical change of the political situation had failed. The uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956 proved that the regime was able to face and defeat any attempt to overturn it. The Polish October and, most of all, the Prague Spring dashed hopes so long cherished by liberal, revisionist Marxists that evolution within the regime could lead to the creation of a juster system of socialism “with a human face.”52 In such a situation, the creation of a strategy directed not at the take-over of power, but at the reshaping of society without seizing power, was of crucial importance. Establishing Solidarity proved that such a strategy could work. However, the lesson of Solidarity was much more complex. By refraining from a direct struggle for power, by introducing (or I would say reintroducing) an ethical dimension into trade union activity and, more generally, into social and political life, Solidarity created a new political field, which in the absence of a better term, was called “civil society.” This new political dimension attracted attention in the West also, first as a success in the fight against the regime but afterwards as a confirmation of the role of values in political life. Ethical values, which had been an important motivation for all political movements since the French Revolution, became eclipsed by the pragmatic politics of welfare-state-oriented democracies in the West. The gap between politics and ethics seemed to be an unavoidable consequence of modern democracy. The success of Solidarity showed that ethical motivation

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could still play an important role in politics. Solidarity emerged as an organization not only independent of the state but actually opposing the state apparatus. This showed that the potential energy existing in the public sphere was still usable as a source of political inspiration and activity. It turned out that people could organize themselves without state support and that this organization worked even better that the stateprovided services. So, even in the West, where there was no need for such a clear distinction between the state and the public sphere as in Eastern Europe, disappointment with the omnipotent bureaucracy became more and more widespread. Solidarity thus looked to the “Western eye” like a combination of two utopian projects: politics based on ethics and the free association of ethically motivated people against the state apparatus. These two projects were, historically speaking, the framework of the modern political agenda in its diverse incarnations from liberalism to nationalism. For liberals the most important point in the Solidarity experience was that people could create a movement which, starting almost from nothing, restored the public sphere. And the vividness of national values, apparently resisting any attempts at eradication, was of vital importance for nationalists. Solidarity, as I have showed earlier, was also, and most of all, a workers’ movement. This side of Solidarity enabled leftist thinkers to appropriate the movement as a fulfillment of leftist utopia. As Michael Walzer observes, one of the features of an ideal society in leftist thought is:53 the political community, the democratic state, within which we can be citizens: freely engaged, fully committed, decision-making members. And a citizen, in this view, is much the best thing to be. To live well is to be politically active, working with our fellow citizens, collectively determining our common destiny not for the sake of this or that determination but for the work itself, in which our higher capacities as rational and moral agents find expression. We know ourselves best as persons who propose, debate, and decide.

In its heroic period of 1980–81 Solidarity was a perfect example of an association of aware citizens. Its strength was based on the active participation of the members in the decision-making process. This participation gave to Solidarity the kind of legitimization which the Communist Party always lacked. Therefore, for the West, the Polish August of 1980 confirmed also the usefulness of a conception which saw popular participation in social life as a sign of the real democratization of society.

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All the above-mentioned factors created an image of Solidarity which fitted every possible concept of civil society. An exception was perhaps the concept of civil society that linked it to the intervention of the state. However, even in this case one could say that the dramatic gap between the state and the independent movement was only temporary, due to the confrontation with communist totalitarianism. In a different situation Solidarity could have became a partner of the state in finding solutions to social problems.

Martial Law or the Ethics of Anti-politics When on December 13 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski, in his pathosladen speech, announced the introduction of Martial Law, he also could not refrain from using Romantic rhetoric. The talk was full of reflections on the history of Poland and dramatic references to the fate of the Nation. It showed how deeply the ethical dimension of social life was rooted in political language during the period of the so-called first Solidarity. General Jaruzuleski, when he spoke about his decision as “a drop in the stream of Polish history”, seemed to a great extent to appropriate the nation-oriented language which Solidarity had put at the centre of political discourse. This language of values and of the unity of the Nation was inevitable and this situation marked the deep change which Solidarity introduced into the social consciousness in Poland, even into the consciousness of its enemies. However, for the actors in the political scene at that time, the differences between the two camps were much more important than possible similarities. The opposition more strongly emphasized its commitment to the reconstruction of society on an ethical basis, and renounced any attempts to take power. Adam Michnik, in a paper written in 1982 in the internment camp in Bialoleka, tried to reconsider the theoretical framework and history of the opposition movement in Poland in order to sketch possible scenarios for the future. He starts from the claim, “The essence of the programs put forward by opposition groups … lay in the attempt to reconstruct society, to restore social bonds outside official institutions. The most important question was not ‘how should the system of government be changed?’ but “how should we defend ourselves against this system?’”54 In this attitude Michnik sees the unique character of Solidarity, which made the movement a role model for a struggle with any dictatorships. “Solidarity can be erased from the walls but not from human memory. The exemplary character of the Polish experiment has been stressed repeatedly: for its absence of violence, for

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its tactic of restoring social ties outside official structures.”55 For this reason the resistance to Martial Law was perceived as a moral, rather than political, issue. “It is difficult to find a universal formula. Everyone has to answer in his own conscience the question how to counter the evil, how to defend dignity, how to behave in the strange war that is a new embodiment of the age-old struggle of truth against lies, of liberty against coercion, of dignity against degradation.”56 Stressing the ethical involvement of the opposition, Michnik expressed the common view at that time that the battlefield between the Party and the opposition had an ethical nature. This is why the idea of civil society gained even more attention than in 1980–81 during the first Solidarity period. After Martial Law it became even more obvious that the sources of power were still available to the Party apparatus. People who believed that in the face of the prevailing democratic and ethical legitimization of Solidarity, the Party nomenklatura were ready to lay down arms were terribly disappointed. The state still seemed to be able to control the situation on the political level. However, it showed weakness as far as informal social relations were concerned. The Party was losing its grip on the political discourse. Instead of using the language of socialism and social reforms, it resorted, as I have shown earlier, to nationalist phraseology. Jaruzelski’s famous statement, “ [W]e will defend socialism as independence,” is a good example of the official discourse of the 1980s. Using Ernesto Laclau’s categories one can say that it was an attempt to forge a link between two different signifiers – socialism and independence – in order find a place for the first in a commonly accepted language of politics. This attempt was doomed to end in failure, and, as a signifier, “socialism” lost all power to motivate people. The attempt to reanimate socialist ideology by connecting it with the national discourse could not work, as the domain of this discourse was occupied by the opposition and the Catholic Church. Therefore, in spite of its hold on political power, the Party was defeated in its effort to hegemonize the political discourse. For this reason the idea of civil society acquired new significance. It became an expression of a society organized against the state; a society unified around common symbols and values. The very idea of solidarity served as a basis for such a vision of society. Conflicts in society and the concept of conflict itself were perceived as being introduced from outside by powers which were foreign to the society. The first steps in recovering the preexisting social unity depended upon resisting the temptation to play the regular political game.

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The idea of civil society which resulted from these conditions had a mainly ethical character. Civil society was to be an organization of people against the state and beyond the state. The state was held to be inevitably corrupt, and the only chance for spiritual restoration lay outside the system. So at the foundation of the idea of civil society there lay an ethical rather than social challenge. For this reason the idea of civil society as accepted in the eighties was to a high degree deliberately utopian. It was to serve as a criterion of the society’s recovery from contamination by the totalitarian state. The network of independent associations, societies and organizations was supposed to be an expression of such a change. Because it was not possible to build such a network in the presence of an oppressive regime, it had to be imagined as an ideal social system.

Civil Society as Myth and as Reality Real problems appeared when in 1989 the dissidents came to power and had to change an ethical utopia into a real system of institutions. Then the problem arose of to what extent the two concepts of civil society could be harmonized. On the one hand, we have discussed how the idea of civil society was seen as as an ethical challenge. In this view, civil society was a utopia of moral self-development rather than a political program: a moral dimension of any human interaction which brought trust into it. Politics from this perspective was perceived as an extension of human relationships, so in this version of the concept of civil society there was no inevitable break between politics and ethics or between the state and civil society. It was the corrupted politics of totalitarian communism that had implemented this gap in the historical circumstances of “real socialism.” On the other hand, civil society was considered a network of associations formed outside the purview of the state. Solidarity was an organization based on values, directed against the state and tending to be unified in program as well as in organizational structure. Morever, it was so powerful that there was almost no physical space for the existence of other organizations. This unity was especially important in the confrontation with the state, so it was obvious that different political options would try to find their place within Solidarity. Therefore, the ethical dimension of civil society prevailed over the idea that civil society is a place where different orientations tried to reach a compromise between them, the public sphere and state administration.

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This was not a problem under communism, but when the regime finally collapsed this ethical concept of civil society paradoxically became an obstacle to forming the structures of a democratic state. Being used to very high ethical standards, to the clear opposition statecivil, and to thinking in the categories of unity, the former dissidents had trouble accepting a disturbed and chaotic social reality with different competitive forces and disarrayed ideological programs. This was not this kind of civil society that they had cherished as an ethical utopia. From a theoretical perspective the problem took the form of a question: to what extent civil society and the functioning of the public sphere was dependent on the individual virtues of the participants in social life. This issue appeared, for instance, during the debate over the reasons for the electoral success of the post-communists in Poland. The standard explanation of the political success of the post-communist party involved ascribing to it the mechanism of “escape from freedom.” During the transformation people attained freedom but lost the security which the totalitarian state had provided. Freedom became for most of them too much of a burden. Therefore they attempted to reconstruct the former situation and thus voted for the post-communist party. This explanation has very often been used by disappointed dissidents like Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik and Jozef Tischner. Tischner is the originator of the concept of homo sovieticus which serves as a description of individuals formed by totalitarianism. Reference to the relics of communism enables him to account for the failure of radical ethical change by the anthropological mechanism of mental enslavement. In The Concept of Civil Sociey, after discussing four possible answers to the question “what is civil society?”, Michael Walzer comes to the conclusion that: There is a fifth answer, the newest one … which holds that the good life can only be lived in civil society, the realm of fragmentation and struggle but also of concrete and authentic solidarities, where we fulfill E.M. Forster’s injunction, “only connect”, and become sociable and communal men and women. And this is, of course, much the best thing to be. The picture here is of people freely associating and communicating with one another, forming and reforming groups of all sorts, not for the sake of any particular formation – family, tribe, nation, religion, commune, brotherhood or sisterhood, interest group or ideological movement – but for the sake of sociability itself. For we are by nature social, before we are political or economic beings. 57

Civil society from Walzer’s perspective is the “setting of settings: all are included, none is preferred.” It is shaped and limited by the two most important factors: citizenship and state. Walzer observes:

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Citizenship … is today mostly a passive role: citizens are spectators who vote. Between elections they are served, well or badly, by the civil service … . But in the associational networks of civil society – in unions, parties, movements, interest groups, and so on – these same people make many smaller decisions and shape to some degree the more distant determinations of state and economy.58

Citizens of contemporary civil society are grassroots activists rather than heroic figures making the crucial decisions of peace and war. Walzer also opts for cooperation between the state and civil society. Here, he refers directly to the Eastern European experience of separating the state and civil society or even, as I have argued, opposing civil society to the state. Mentioning a book by Hungarian dissident George Konrad called Anti-Politics, Walzer writes: He [Konrad] urged his fellow dissidents to reject the very idea of seizing or sharing power and to devote their energies to religious, cultural, economic, and professional associations. Civil society appears in his book as an alternative to the state, which he assumes to be unchangeable and irredeemably hostile. His argument seemed right to me when I first read his book. Looking back … I can easily see how much it was a product of its time … . No state can survive for long if it is wholly alienated from civil society. It cannot outlast its own coercive machinery; it is lost, literally, without its firepower. The production and reproduction of loyalty, civility, political competence, and trust in authority are never the work of the state alone, and the effort to go it alone – one meaning of totalitarianism – is doomed to failure.59

The relationships between the state and civil society can be and are very complicated and sometimes hostile but both parties need each other. But only a democratic state can support civil society and vice versa: civil society can flourish only in a democracy. If we compare Walzer’s vision of civil society with the idea of civil society developed by the democratic opposition in Eastern Europe we immediately see the differences. On the one side there is plurality, fragmentation, the citizen’s involvement in grassroots activity; on the other, ethical standards, unity around values, and an ambivalent attitude to politics, either anti-politics or involvement in the highest level of the political discourse. These two views seem difficult to harmonize but if we perceive the differences as a reflection of historical circumstances then we can also find background similarities. In both cases the point was to develop a strategy which would enable people to participate more in public life. In both cases such a task demanded reformulation of the idea of citizenship and the relationship between ethics and politics. In Eastern Europe the goal was to renew the role of trust in social relationships. In the West the most important thing is to introduce more and more plurality in social life to oppose and to supplement the

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pragmatic state’s administration. In both cases freedom is the issue which makes people fight for the development of civil society. Both points of view can learn from each other and use each other’s experience. The Western proponents of civil society can take the Eastern European experience as a proof that in some situations ethics can be more powerful then politics, and that the ethical dimension of social life remains an inevitable part of any sound society. For Eastern Europe the lesson is somewhat different. We learn that sometimes it is worthwhile to risk lower ethical standards if this pays us back by increasing social activity in the different spheres of social life.

Life as Simulacrum: Stanislaw Lem’s Science Fiction Literature, Society, and Philosophy: The Case of Science Fiction Science fiction is an interesting genre of literature. Being now relegated to the domain of cheap, pop writing, it still conveys a memory of its noble origin in Plato’s Republic. The story of the unreal but socially perfect city was repeated again and again over centuries, giving testimony not only to the longing for an ideal but also to the need to combine philosophy and literature. It looks as if philosophy in its abstract categories was not able to convince people to believe in social ideals and to persuade the readers to follow them. Utopia thus would be a testimony of philosophy to its own failure, to the necessity of supplementing a scheme of reasoning with the flesh of a traveller’s story which never could have happened but whose non-existence seems to be more mesmerizing than the bare logic of argumentation. Evidence of argumentation must yield to a narrative of suspicious witness, the logic of eternal order must be legitimized by a shaky and chaotic account of unreal events. Once upon a time … is hypnotic; if a then b is at best boring. However, the problem lies not only in the feeling of excitement or boredom. It is much more about the representation of the unreal. The science fiction story, the account of utopia, is directed at creating a space between the real and unreal. This space, with its own rules, different from those of the real as well as of the unreal, allows readers and philosophers to move smoothly between the edges of reality and unreality. Classic (pre-Marxist) utopia thus had the charm of the fable rather than the solemn power of myth. Marx changed utopia from fable into a kind of “scientific” speculation. On the other hand, almost at the same time, utopia shifted entirely to literature as science fiction in a strict sense of the term.

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Thus in the nineteenth century the old utopia split between a quasiscientific imaginary of the necessity of the unreal, and a literary dream of human power over nature. In both cases science became an indispensable part of utopia. In Marxism (and to some extent in Positivism) utopia posed itself as science closing the circle, a figure which originated with Plato’s Republic. Philosophy returned to itself this time disguised as science. In literature we have the naive apologetic of scientific progress, as in Jules Verne, and the first warnings of the dangers of the development of technology, as in The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Science was the real hero of those stories, a real “ghost in the machine” manipulating the human subjects, or with human subjects being merely an incarnation of scientific procedures. This division left the public with the illusion that those two embodiments of the old utopia were separated by an unbridgeable gap. On the one hand, we had the rigour and clearness of science; on the other, fairy tales revealing fears and anxieties of modern society. This situation has not changed a lot in the past hundred years. The gap inside utopia increased more and more as science fiction in its different varieties degenerated more and more and finally was counted as mere pulp fiction. The “scientific” side of utopia became at the same time more and more “scientific.” Even the collapse of Marxist prediction did not put an end to the idea of the possibility of the description of “trends” and prediction of the “future.” Beneath the superficial differences, it is clear that the two sides of utopia – scientific and fabulous – mirror each other. Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer, was one of those authors who attempted to reestablish the broken link between philosophy and literature. His work is a perfect example of the fertile possibilities of such a hybrid. Lem’s writing strategy was to explore, very often through the use of absurd situations, what happens when traditional philosophical theories are confronted by the possibilities raised by technological progress. To some extent Lem’s work can be described as “philosophical experimentation” where hypotheses are put to the test by new technologies. In describing this confrontation, Lem doesn’t cease to be a writer of fiction. He is conscious that this position gives him more freedom in his game with philosophical concepts. In passing through the contested land between philosophy and literature, when he is approaching uncomfortably close to the realms of philosophy, he can always return to the safe retreat of literary narratives.

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Life and Work. An Eastern European Biography and Science Fiction It is always risky to make too strong a connection between biography and work but Lem’s life obviously influenced his artistic activity and philosophical views. As a witness of Nazism and the Holocaust he had to be very cautious about any definite concept of human nature and moral values. Living in the “embodied utopia” of a communist regime he had to be sceptical about the simple link between technological progress and human happiness. Experiencing a system which was able to send people into outer space and at the same time never solved the problem of production and distribution of toilet paper, made Lem sensitive to the inner contradictions of the social consequences of even the most advanced technology. Generally speaking the hard core of Lem’s philosophical views is the idea that there is no general law governing human life. His universe is a universe of chances, of unpredictable mechanisms set in motion by the capricious coincidences of events. Among many topics treated by Lem I have chosen the problem of simulation as the most characteristic representation of his philosophical views. This issue is inevitable connected with the writer’s biography, for the communist regime mastered the ability to create “artificial reality” in the media and propaganda. When I started to read Lem in the sixties and seventies as a high school student I read his stories mainly as a kind of grotesque representation of the drawbacks of communism. Now, I think that his theses on simulation are of a more profound character. Lem developed the theory of simulation (including virtual reality) earlier than most Western scientists. His perspective on this topic antedate the currently very popular concept of simulacra created by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard.

Life as Simulation Lem touched on the concept of simulation in a relatively early work, the collection of stories entitled Star Diaries. The main character in these stories is Iljon Tichy, a space pilot who is an embodiment of common sense in the crazy world of the technologically advanced civilization. In one of his adventures Iljon is pursuing the traces of a universe-famous sage named Oh, who is the author of a general theory of simulation and is implementing his theory everywhere in the universe. For instance, knowing the deadly consequences of technological progress, Master Oh invented a simulation of progress, training people of one planet to use

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electric eels as a source of energy. In this way the planet avoided the environmental disaster caused by nuclear power plants, at same time allowing people to enjoy the benefits of developed technology. In this part of the story Lem directs his irony towards both ends of the controversy: he mocks the environmentalists who believe in the unlimited possibilities of “clean” technology as well as the believers in technological progress as a source of human happiness. In the next part of Lem’s story the illusion of the omnipotence of simulation goes farther. The sage dissolves the conflict between a maverick scientist and the clergy about the astronomic question. The scientist claims that the sun goes around the Earth, which is an offense to the local religion. The situation is quite dangerous as the scientist can be punished severely, capital punishment included. Master Oh uses a planet brake to stop the planet. This is observed by the scientist from jail and he becomes eager to confess his mistake. The simulation of objective truth is established in this way. So it turns out that even objective truth can be simulated. But probably the most extreme proof of the omnipotence of simulation is the simulation of eternity and immortality. Following the traces of the sage’s activity Iljon Tichy eventually comes to the society which is the most significant achievement of the theory of simulation. In this society there areis a certain fixed number of positions in every aspects of social life. Every midnight the positions got changed by lot. So one day an individual could be the president of the state and a brother; on the next day the same individual might change into a gardener and a sister. The only problem was with the position of father. It sometimes happened that the position of the father was occupied by women in the last stages of pregnancy. So a special law was needed to allow the father to give birth to children in order to liquidate the discrepancy between the biological and the social. This social arrangement, called “artificial eternity”, was invented to harmonize the longing for stability with the desire for change. In this society death does not exist as there is no individual that could die. The number of social positions is fixed so there is no individual who could die. The moral which is presented in the story by one of the members of the society is that individualism is the biggest threat to human happiness. When we read this story under communism we took it as a critique of collectivist ideology. Now, from a distance and after the collapse of the communist regime, I would be more cautious about such a direct interpretation. I now see this story as a parable of human nature rather than of a particular social system. Lem tells us about impossibility of

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achieving what human beings want most and about the illusion that they can acquire it by means of technological tools. If we do not have what we want in the real world, the only way of getting it is simulation. Lem shows, however, that there is a price for such an approach, for letting technological progress solve our existential dilemmas. In Lem’s later work the problem of simulation takes on a much more sophisticated form than a simple critique of technological progress. In the collection of essays A Perfect Vacuum, a piece entitled Non Serviam discusses a fictional science called personetics which is described as “the cruelest science man created.” (A Perfect Vacuum is a collection of reviews of non-existing books, so it is in itself a play on the concept of simulation). Personetics is a kind of experimental theogony, the construction of an artificial world using such computer programs as BAAL 66, CREAN IV and JAHVE 09. These programs can generate intelligent beings for whom the real world is the world of mathematics. Lem focuses on the relationship between these beings and their creator. In this way Lem approaches the old philosophical problem of the existence of the God and of what human beings owe to their creator and what He owes to them. Subsequent generations of personoids (as the inhabitants of this mathematical world are called) discover the same reasonings on this topic as were developed in human history. EDAN 197 invents again “Pascal’s wager” that God does not owe us anything. In contrast to actual history, this reasoning was extended by ADAN 300 in the following way: “For in all worlds it is this: when there is no full certainty, there is no full accountability. This formulation is by pure logic unassaible, because it sets up a symmetrical function of reward in the context of the theory of games, whoever in the face of uncertainty demands full accountability destroys the mathematical symmetry of the game, and we then have a so-called game of non-zero sum.” Even if somebody would try to defend God using the argument “credo quia absurdum est”, the answer is “no” because of the demand of logic. “What I wish to say”, says one of the personoids, “is that if one believes in contradiction, one should believe only in contradiction, and not at the same time in uncontradictions (i.e., in logic) in some other areas. If, however, such a dualism is insisted upon … then one thereupon obtains a model of creation as something that is, with regard to logical correctness, “patched” and it is no longer possible for us to postulate its perfection.” At the end of this story Lem gives voice to Prof. Dobb, the director of the experiment, who in fact is the Creator of the beings who have become more and more certain of his non-existence. He is their creator

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but they do not owe him anything. On the contrary he is embarrassed by the experiment which created a world which must perish at some point when the university refuses to pay his electricity bills. His only honorable course of behavior is to postpone this moment. So simulation is for Lem an opportunity for philosophical experimentation. He is testing some philosophical dogmas and in this way showing that many of our beliefs are at best dubious. The most important of these convictions is the doctrine that the universe must be ordered according to “iron laws.” Lem instead proposes a universe of chance where everything is contingent. The personoids who seek the logic of their existential situation are in fact dependent on a university budget, which is probably the most contingent thing in the world.

Life, Simulation, and Deception Lem’s story The Mask60 starts from a Cartesian experiment of an analysis of the contents of the mind. The hero, and at this moment we do not know who is speaking, just reports the elementary states of mind: “In the beginning there was darkness and cold flame and lingering thunder, and, in long strings of sparks, char-black hooks, segmented hooks which passed me on, and creeping metal snakes that touched the thing that was me with their snout-like flattened heads, and each such touch brought on a lightning tremor, sharp, almost pleasurable.”61 And as in Descartes’ experiment the creature is able to find out more and more about the surrounding world and itself. What is characteristic in the narrative is the constant split between the “I”, the very centre of consciousness, and the “me” (or as it is put in the story, “the thing that was me”) the idea of the body and outside reality. At some point “a tenuous string snapped within me and I, a she now, felt the rush of gender so violently, that her head spun and I shut my eyes.”62 She suddenly realizes that she is participating in a court ball and that she is an extremely beautiful woman. She attracts the gaze of all people in the room with the exception of the most important person, the King. In fact he does pay attention to her but in a very strange manner: “I felt I was truly valuable to him, but in some inexplicable way, as if he had no use for me myself.”63 She is also perplexed with her identity as marked by the past because she feels that she has not one but many pasts. She could choose between three possible names and three alternative family histories. So her knowledge is fragmented and confused: she knows almost everything about the people at court, and she knows her pasts in detail, but at same time, reasoning logically, she

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is aware of the inconsistency in her knowledge. She has to confront the old problem of the differentiation between reality and dream, for while she is sure about some things from the outer world such as the names and ranks of people at court, at the same time she is almost helpless in her knowledge of her own identity. It is clear that at this moment the Cartesian dilemma is reversed: the heroine of the story knows the outer world with much more certainty than she does her own consciousness. What is more, her inner knowledge about herself is contradictory: “Truth cannot contradict itself, and I was a duenna, a countess, an orphan, all these genealogies revolved within me; each one could take on substance if I acknowledged it; I understood now that the truth would be determined by my choice and whim, that whichever I declared, the images unmentioned would be blown away.”64 As the ball continues she starts a love affair with a man who, as she somehow knows, is an enemy of the King. The King despised him like no other but he had promised his dying mother “that if harm befell that wise man it would be of his own choosing.”65 She is in love with him but she feels that there is something hidden behind the emotion, as if some power would prevent her from expressing what she senses. “I feared the emotions he aroused in me, however it had nothing to do with love, I had only said what I had been able to say, as when in the darkness, in a swamp, one extends a careful foot, lest the next step plunge one into deep water. So did I feel my way in words testing with my breath what I would be able – and what I would not be permitted – to say.”66 So again she fails in her efforts to clear her mind to find the idea of her “I” as freed from any doubts. She fails because for the success of such an enterprise it is necessary to have an obvious memory even for the purpose of rejecting it to find the concept of “I” located beyond any uncertainties. If we had at our disposal three alternative memories of our past then how could we proceed to find the sense of our “I”? By the same token, the second, non-Cartesian source of certainty is deconstructed in the story. Love, which in Judeo-Christian tradition is a foundation of certainty alternative to Reason, seems to be only an illusion, a mask for something else. The only thing which still remains is a feeling of fate: “I willowy and sweet, girl-like, understood more clearly that I was his fate, fate in that terrible sense of unavoidable doom.”67 Thus, at this moment she is in a state of total confusion. On the one hand, she has a feeling of controlling her own behavior and thoughts, of what is considered to be free will. Still more, she is able, and aware of this capability, to use logical reasoning to set up, or to uncover, her identity. “Could it be that I was imagining everything, that

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the ultimate reality here was an old unemotional brain, entangled in the experiences of countless years? Perhaps a sharpened intellect was my only true past, perhaps I had arisen from logic, and that logic constituted my one authentic genealogy … ?”68 On the other hand, she feels also that logic, at least as used for the search for certitude, fails to give any definite answer to the question of her identity. She considers the possibility that she is the property of the King but she rejects this option: “If I was the property of the King, then how was I able to know this? Even to reflect on it at night ought to have been forbidden me … . If the preparations had been flawless, then why did I recall things I should not have recalled? … Could it be that some flaw lay in the design and execution? Careless errors, an oversight, hidden leaks, taken for riddles or a bad dream? But in that case I had reason to hope again. To wait. To wait, as things progressed, for further inconsistencies to accumulate, and make of them a sword to turn against the King, against myself, it did not matter against whom, as long as it ran counter to the fate imposed.”69 The other potential source of certainty, the body, is also full of vagueness; she is able to inspect her body carefully almost with the knowledge and passion of a trained anatomist. She discovers alarming signs in her body: “But the elbows, the wrists? Beneath the skin – like a hard lump, was it swollen glands? Calcium deposits? Impossible, not in keeping with my beauty, with its absoluteness. … And so my body had secrets too, its otherness corresponded to the otherness of my soul, to its fear in my self-musing, there was in this a pattern, a congruency, a symmetry: if here, then there too. If the mind, then the limbs also. If I, then you as well.”70 In this situation of more and more terrifying ambiguity she turns to love and to its object. But as I have mentioned above, love itself is not an explanation of her situation, it becomes a weapon in the discovery of her true identity. It is not, however, in the romantic sense of love that she determines her true self, through her love understood as devotion to the other. She can only use her love and his love to find an ally in the fight against her still indefinite fate. “I could only act deceitfully, giving freedom the false name of love, and only in and through that lie show him to himself as the victim of an unknown someone.”71 She has to fail also in this venture, and she feels that whatever she could have said, it had been doomed to go wrong. “I realized that all this was for nothing, the style would not permit it. What sort of love scene is it, in which Nicolette confesses to Aucassin that she is his branding iron, his butcher?”72

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She has to be alone in solving the mystery of her identity and, of course, the solution turns out horribly for herself as well as for her lover. This solution means the death of the old “I,” the death of the soul and flesh altogether. She decides to unmask her body, to cut it open to find the real being hidden inside. “I looked at myself in the glass. This was I, I told myself wordlessly, I. Still I. The smooth sheaths, coleopterous, insect-like, the knobby joints, the abdomen in its cold sheen silver, the oblong sides designed for speed, the darker, bulging head, this was I.”73 Afterwards, she rediscovers and redefines herself; she is able to realize the changes which she undergoes. First love dies: “Love died. It will die in you as well, but over years or months, this same waning I experienced in a matter of moments, it was third in my series of beginnings, and emitting a faint shuffling hiss, I ran three times around the room, touching with outstretched, quivering feelers the bed on which it was denied me now to rest.”74 Second, she determines her real purpose: to chase and to kill her former lover. She turns out to be a perfect assassination machine specially devised to slay that particular person. So it could seem that at this point her search for identity ends. Now, she has “only” to fulfill her task to find and kill the man designated by the King. In doing this, however, she does not cease to be a self-conscious being. She is still able to reflect on her own behavior, thoughts and feelings. “I know how unwelcome that will sound to sentimental souls, but having no hands to wring, no tears to shed, no knees on which I might fall, nor lips to press the flowers gathered the day before, I did not surrender myself to prostration.”75 So, she starts her hunt which, to her astonishment, lasts not days but weeks and months. However, she realizes, “To me this seemed not more abominable than the conduct of any other being that has written into it its own fate.”76 She also gets to know about her real nature, eavesdropping on what people have said about her. “Yet I was supposed to have been no ordinary death machine, but a special device, one capable of assuming any form: a beggar, a child in a cradle, a lovely young lass, but also a metal reptile. These shapes were the larvae in which the assassin emissary showed itself to its victim, in order to deceive him, but to everyone else it appeared as a scorpion made of silver, scurrying with such rapidity that no one yet had been able to count its legs.”77 In her hunt she starts to realize the similarity between her fate and that of her prey. She becomes more and more aware of this likeness and at some point she decides to attempt to reverse her fate. It happens in the monastery where she is staying, having for the time being lost the trail of her victim. In this place she chooses to make a confession to a monk, asking for help. First, she explains the situation: “I began once more to

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brood on our common fate and liking for this man rose up in me, for I saw that I wanted desperately to kill him, for the reason that I could not longer love him.”78 Second, she has to answer the monk’s question: “And what if you should find the one you seek? Do you know what you will do then?”79 The reply has to be complex as she does not know the limits of her free will but what she knows is that if she abandons her task she would have no goal before her, and as she says, “I shall find nothing for which it would be worth continuing my existence.”80 The further part of the conversation is directed at her effort to determine the nature of the machine. The monk’s response is, “I am not versed in the construction of your kind, nevertheless I see and hear you and you seem to me, from what you say, to be an intelligent being, though possibly in thrall to a limiting compulsion; yet … as you indeed tell me, you struggle with this compulsion.”81 The limits of free will remain ambiguous, and she is not able to answer what she will do if she finds her prey. Her answer is once more: “Father, I tell you once again that I do not know, for though I wish him no evil, that which is written within me may prove more powerful than what I wish.”82 This response makes the monk call the machine “sister” and he explains, “it means I neither raise myself above you nor humble myself before you, for however much we may differ, your ignorance, which you have confessed to me and which I believe, makes us equals in the face of Providence.”83 In this dialogue the monk seems to follow the thought of Allan Turing, who invented the famous hypothesis of a computer’s capacity to think. As is well known, if we converse with somebody we do not see and after a long conversation we cannot decide whether or not our interlocutor is a machine we have to accept it as a being which is able to think. Lem, however, modifies this “Turing’s theorem”: he stresses ignorance as a sign of humanity. Machines as animals are sure about their destiny, while humans have to seek their true fates and fail in these efforts. The machine is inspected again and again by the monks and they find that she is an “ultimate machine” as she is not only an expert on “the individual characteristics of the human psyche” but also in her mechanism they locate “a multiple memory of things superfluous to a hunting machine, for these are recorded feminine histories, filled with names and turns of phrase that lure the mind, and a conductor runs from them into the fatal core.” They try to help the machine to escape from her destiny; the only remedy, “I can sprinkle the poles of the place in question with finely ground particles of iron using a tube. This would increase somewhat the bounds of your freedom. Yet even if I do this, you

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will not know up until the last moment whether, in rushing to the aid of someone, you are not still an obedient tool against him.”84 This freedom is needed as she gets to know in the monastery that her prey was abducted and she has an opportunity of liberating him from oppression. So she chases him again, this time as possible saviour, but the saviour who can transform herself into an assassin. When she finds Ahrrodes he is already dead, having been killed by his abductors. In this way Lem suspends the answer to the crucial question of the story. But much has been said in the story. The heroine of the tale is originally designed to be a trap, a deceptive machine which lures her prey in order to assassinate him. However, the perfect illusion needs to be as true as reality, since otherwise its illusionary nature will be exposed sooner or later. This is Lem’s point of departure in this story, but also a persistent motif in his writings. Thus the King who wants to deceive his enemy has to prepare the ultimate machine, so ideal that she ceases to be a machine and becomes a true human being. The same applies to society in general. In another story Lem explores, this time in a more grotesque form, the problem of an illusionary society. The main character of the story, a cyberconstructor named Trurl, finds on a remote planet the person who turns out to be a despot in exile. Trurl constructs for him a miniature, illusory state: There were plenty of towns, rivers, mountains, forests and brooks, a sky with clouds, armies full of derring-do, citadels, castles and ladies’ chambers … nights full of dancing and song until dawn. … Trurl also set into this kingdom a fabulous capital, all in marble and alabaster, and assembled a council of hoary sages, and winter palaces and summer villas, plots, conspirators, false witnesses, nurses, informers, … also threw in the necessary handful of traitors, another of heroes, added a pinch of prophets and seers, and one messiah, and one great poet … . And all of this connected, mounted and ground to precision, fit into a box and not a very large box, but just the size that could be carried about with ease.85

Trurl’s friend Klapaucius realizes that this illusionary society is so perfect that it ceases to be a deception created for a tyrant but is rather a real society consisting of real people who suffer authentic oppression. This erasure of the distinction between reality and deception does not remove the deception, as the reality itself is deceptive. The machine from The Mask is a allegory of human nature. The deception is embodied in human destiny and it remains an inevitable part of human existence at different levels. Human life is to a great extent defined by genetic endowment and much of that which seems to be of vast significance in our lives is only a cover for the prolongation of the code. Lem formulates (under the mask of the future computer Golem) that the

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meaning of a code is the code itself. From this point of view our culture is merely a cover which hides the nakedness of the decisions made by the code. Culture is a “mistake” but a mistake which is necessary for the survival of humankind. However, Lem remains to some extent ambivalent about the role of this mistake in constituting human nature. As a writer, not a philosopher, he can of course enjoy the comfort of being hesitant about this matter. A lot of what we consider a constitutive feature of human nature and our culture is an error which has to be hidden. As a large part of our existence consists in veiling this error, deception is an inevitable part of our lives. Apart from this “ontological” concept of deception, Lem also develops the concept of a mistake which is of a more existential character. An error is then an irrational action of an individual, an action taken against rational calculations as to success and failure. Such an irrationality has to prove that an actor is a real “human being”, not a perfectly programmed machine. If one takes this idea to extremes, one can say, maybe going beyond Lem’s intention, that this “existential” concept of error contradicts the “ontological” concept. If rationality, built on the mistaken notion of human nature and culture, is deceptive, then our capacity to take irrational action is a kind of temporary victory over deception.

Chapter 2

Social Time or the Ontology of Expectations Ontology of Expectations Social Time and Political Time In the previous chapter I discussed the problem of political time, that is, the time which is a weapon in the political struggle. This function of time is connected with such phenomena as transitional justice, lustration, compensation and use of the past as a direct accusation of political enemies. Under this label I also subsume the issue of the “struggle for memory”, that is, the attempt to impose a certain vision of the past on a whole society by a particular group. However I do nor think that the problem of the social function of time is confined only to current politics. The relationship to time or, precisely speaking, to time ordering, has a more profound dimension. It can set up one of the main trajectories which enables a society to establish itself as a whole, as a structure different from other societies. To differentiate this function of time I shall use the label of “social time” as complementary to “political time”. From my point of view the most important dimension of social time is the social relationship between the past, the present and the future. Societies chose whether they are oriented towards the future or to the past. They also chose how the past, the present, and the future are arranged in the institutions, rituals, art, etc. These arrangements and divisions form the axes that divide the social world into different entities according to their attitudes to time. Those dimensions constitute a habitus of social groups, a basic ontology of the social world. This ontology is a phenomenon within the area of collective intentionality as defined in John Searle’s book The Construction of Social Reality.1 However, as I have indicated earlier, this perspective needs to be supplemented by the institutional context of time construction. Such a

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context can be provided by work on social memory as well as the investigation of the concept of time in different cultures and societies. One example of such an approach to time is Mary Douglas’s work on social institutions. Discussing the problem of the consumption of goods, she emphasizes that they are “physical markers of social meanings.”2 Goods are used to mark intervals of time, and this statement is consistent with her general point of view that our means of classification, those things which create the human environment, must come from the society, from the social a priori.3 This a priori is created mainly by social institutions, and Mary Douglas describes the relationships between knowledge and institutions in the following way: For discourse to be possible at all, the basic categories have to be agreed on. Nothing but institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution. Elements get assigned to sets where institutions find their own analogies in nature. On the one hand, the emotional energy for creating sets of analogies comes from social concerns. On the other hand, there is a tension between the incentives for individual minds to spend their time and energy on difficult problems and the temptation to sit back and let the founding analogies of the surrounding society take over.

Douglas in this passage gets to the centre of the problem of time construction as a part of the broader problem of the creation of social reality by institutions. Institutions impose on individuals the standards for perceiving the world. These standards are so fixed in social life that they form a kind of social ontology which rarely can be overcome. At the same time, she is right in putting emphasis on the possibility of the individual’s capacity to create new categories which in turn can become a part of an institutional context of the process of knowledge. This process, of course, assumes a complicated relationship between an individual and its society as well as the struggle for dominance among different groups over the validity of their concept of time. Before I start to discuss these problems I would like first to say some words about the possible objects which make up the ontology of time.

Expectations and the Process of Transition I think that for this social ontology the most important objects are expectations. They enable people to order the world according to a time arrow. People can expect the same situation to be repeated in the future, they can expect to return to a previous state of affairs or they can expect more or less radical changes in their societies. However, even in the case of conservative societies expectations by their nature are directed toward

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the future, and this ontology seems to secure for the future a privileged position. On the other hand, however, expectations stem from past experience, and in fact, they are very rarely able to overcome the past horizon. This makes the future involved in building up expectation more of a future-in-the-past than a future which is included in the existential project. Therefore, if expectations are compared with the “real” future, which, in the meantime, becomes the present, they have to be corrected or transformed. There are a number of psychological and sociological studies which show that such a transformation is a painful and difficult process. In some extreme cases like those, for instance, described by Ludwig Festinger in his study on “cognitive dissonance”, experience did not change believers’ fixed attitudes: thus believers in the imminent arrival of doomsday reacted to contradictory experience contradictory by becoming much more active in seeking publicity which they before had avoided.5 I think that data from individual psychology can be applied to cultures and societies. These also develop their own “defense mechanisms” which permit them to preserve stability in the face of a changing environment. Therefore, the “ontology of expectations” perspective hypothesizes that new expectations appear rather than that the old ones become extinct. Hence, we have the development of alternative futures stemming from the same past. These alternative futures represent a different vision of the social order in reference to behaviour. They are implemented in the actions of the social institutions and they also create a number of objective, social meanings, which make a map of a significant world of action. The dominant role of expectations for the construction of the social world was especially apparent in the process of transition in Eastern Europe. To understand the expectations people had under the communist regime we have to refer for a moment to the relationships between an individual and the collective under communist government. As I wrote earlier in the book there was a complicated relation between the official ideology of collectivism and the practice of life which was mainly individualistic. This tension between the official collectivism and the need for individual initiative appeared in all spheres of social life. This was even more true of the peasantry, which despite being mostly private under communism (one of the peculiarities of the communist administration of Poland) was, through the system of contracts and price control, strongly connected with the state. Peasants took advantage of the inefficiency of the state-controlled trade system and sold their products illegally. They had good reason to think that the changing of the social system would result in the destruction of legal barriers to their

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activity but did not foresee any significant changes in the support the state gave to agriculture. People scarcely dreamed of changing the social system but tried to find a good niche in it for themselves. We thus had two waves of reasoning and emotions. On the one hand, the intellectuals who took part in the underground movement appealed to the individualistic phraseology of human nature, human rights, etc. Ordinary people, on the other hand, believed that changing the system would mean destroying the obstacles to their individual activity, but they imagined this activity as remaining basically the same as under communism. To sum up, one can say that the “ideal social system” which emerged in the minds of people was an extrapolation of the main features of the existing socialism. All legal forms of social security should be preserved in it but made more just, and any barriers to an individual’s initiative were to be destroyed. Therefore, as Jadwiga Staniszkis observes, after the collapse of the communist state “the new political elite … projects onto society its vision, rather than representing the interests of concrete social groups.”6 No wonder that when the dream of the collapse of the communist system became real, people started immediately to express their disappointment. They found that they were living in a very different future than that which they had dreamed of. Some of them, especially the “losers” in the process of transformation, developed a system of defense of these earlier expectations. They voted for the post-communist party (Social Democracy of the Polish Republic) because they believed that this party could preserve the social structure of the communist state without the terror apparatus. Others started to build up new expectations based upon a mythological vision of the free market society, in which there are unlimited possibilities for individuals. They supported the liberal wing of the post-Solidarity political force. As I have discussed earlier, some former dissidents interpreted the appearance of massive support for the post-communists in terms of “escaping from freedom”, to use the famous phrase coined by Erich Fromm. Jozef Tischner developed this idea in the broader anthropological concept of homo sovieticus, which serves as a description of individuals who have been formed by totalitarianism. Reference to the remnants of communism enables him to account for the failure of radical ethical change by citing the anthropological mechanism of mental enslavement. He says: [C]ommunism was a secular version of the religious theory of predestination. It is striking that such a faith was so accepted in contemporary times. This acceptance can be

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accounted for only by the fact that this faith is the newest version of the “escape from freedom” … . One can say … fear of freedom gives rise every day to the faith in predestination. He who is afraid of freedom needs fatum because it only can save him.7

I would be more inclined to describe this situation as a clash between two different future-oriented ontologies. On the one hand, we have the ontology of expectations based on the mythological concept of liberalism and the free-market economy as a panacea for all social problems emerging in the process of transformation. These expectations are based on the need for a radical break with the past. On the other hand, the other ontology of expectations built up an image of the possibility of preserving a substantial part of the old system in the new situation. It is especially interesting that both ontologies stem from mythological images rather than from the absorption of real interests. For this reason, Polish politics has a symbolic character; and it is a “politics of identity” rather than that of the representation of real interests.8 Different futures emerge from the past, but at the same time they absorb the past and transfigure it according to their needs. Expectations that are to some extent products of institutions seem to contribute also to institution building. In a interesting paper, “Anticipated Institutions: The Power of Path-finding Expectations” Michal Federowicz puts forward the hypothesis that: “the theological aspect of institutional change is necessary to understanding it. This is not to say that one is able to design or predict the outcome of transformation, but no change is possible without any future-oriented design.”9 This future-oriented design takes the shape of expectations concerning institutions that could function in a new society. Expectations present, of course, a simplified vision of the future order but they can affect the behavior of people involved in changes: Social actors formulate and constantly adjust their strategies according not only to existing circumstances but also in reference to their evaluation of the most probable path of development. Thus, peoples’ expectations of the plausible institutional change affect their behavior. If the path-finders find reward with their new strategies, they will be followed by others. If they are punished, previous strategies will continue to dominate. In this way, social responses to signals sent to them from the system level may increase or decrease overall social capacity for change.10

The author discusses his thesis using the example of privatization as an “anticipated institution”. He emphasizes the fact that privatization in Eastern Europe had different roots from that in the West. In the latter it was a reaction against inefficiency and budget difficulties, whereas in the case of Eastern Europe privatization was one of the main factors of

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transformation, and it was mostly a question of restoring the feeling of ownership and property rights. Therefore, according to the author: the widespread expectations connected with promotion of the economic relations show the distance separating the former institutional order of any of the variants of real socialism from any of the varieties of a market economy. This great distance between the two worlds justifies the need to make use of a “vision of a future goal”. In spite of the great simplification which such a vision brings, and in spite of its naiveté, it allows change to be directed, it allows “anticipated institutions” to be brought into play, and because of these, to overcome the critical point of domination of the powers which blocked all reforms in the past.11

Expectations thus can play an important function vis-à-vis institutions. As I have argued earlier they are produced and regulated by institutions. Expectations, however, are not immutable. On the contrary, because of their future-oriented nature they tend to promote change in society, even if is a truncated change, and overlies the preservation of the existing state of affairs. These changes have to affect also the institutional design of society. In the situation of a social crisis as described above, expectations can play a decisive role in the imaginary system of social institutions. In such a situation expectations can be taken from the outside, as in the quoted example, but, of course, they are always “written into” the existing system of expectations. Therefore, on the one hand expectations have to present a vision clear enough to be a basis for social action, and on the other hand, they must be vague and open enough to fulfill the needs of different groups in society. Therefore, in elaborating the content of expectations I have to avoid too clear a description of their historical forms. I need to eschew the historical approach, which, based on the logical reconstruction of its subject, imposes on the reader the consequences and conclusions that the subject is in itself lacking. Instead I will employ the genealogical approach originated by Nietzsche and developed by Michel Foucault.

Genealogy of Expectations In the beginnings of his essay on genealogy, Foucault gives the following description: “[G]enealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched and recopied many times.”12 As such, genealogy is in various ways opposed to history. Referring to Nietzsche’s book on the genealogy of morals, Foucault observes that genealogy rejects the linear development of events as the fulfillment of a general idea. Instead:

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it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history – in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles. Finally, genealogy must define even those instances where they are absent, the moment they remained unrealized.13

Thus, in pursuing the traces of expectations I intend to look for different points of intersection which are emerging as postulates for questioning the existing states of affairs. Expectations are not realistic images arising from a logical analysis of reality; they rather set up fantasies and desires that never will be fulfilled but remain the driving forces behind the longing to build a new social system. Expectations thus form a close kinship link with the Nietzschean concept of effective history (wirkliche Historie) which is, according to Foucault, one of the main sources of genealogical analysis: “Effective” history differs from traditional history in being without constants. … History becomes “effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatize our instincts, and multiplies our body and sets it against itself. “Effective” history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.14

So the expectations I would like to trace are of a mythological character; they help people to survive and to find the meaning of their existence in the social world but at the price of the illusion of stability and continuity. They pretend to form a logical whole which can govern rational action, but this is a mask which covers the madness of decisions made at random in the social world. Genealogy as I understand it has to uncover the mythologies underlying social decisions. To uncover them seems to mean introducing an idea of social critique, but this is not my sole purpose. The critique must be coupled with the idea of the inevitability of expectations and of the necessity for the reemergence of the new and of new mythologies. For this reason my use the concept of genealogy is different than that of Foucault. I intend to show the intersections of different lines of thought which give expectations the power to change social relations. Consequently I am trying to show the ways of constructing social reality as a task directed to the future, which presupposes the existence of “positive” elements in social mythology. The most important question for me is not how to disguise the mythology of the social but how the myths are formed and which roles they play in social life.

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For the cognitive structure underlying expectations I use here the concept of mythology instead of the more popular one of ideology. I think that the concept of myth (and the myth of origins) is broader than the concept of ideology as developed in the Marxist tradition. First, the concept of ideology presupposes a strict connection between class interests and “literary superstructure.” Second, it denotes “false consciousness” in its original meaning and in its later incarnations in Marxist thought, with the exception of the consciousness of the working class. In this book I try to avoid both problems. In my opinion the images of social reality are relatively independent of direct class interests. Therefore, I use the concept of myth, which is more informal and less overloaded than that of ideology, in order to describe how political behavior is regulated by social representations of reality. Were I to include the notion of ideology in my conceptual framework I would say that it can be formed at the crossroads of different myths. Ideology would then be much more accurate in representing group interests. However, as it was shown convincingly by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, modern societies assume different kinds of political identity. It is much more scattered and dispersed and, to use their terminology, oscillates through various “subject positions.”15 For such societies the concept of ideology has only limited validity. Instead it is the concept of mythology that can be most useful in describing unified forces in the post-conventional societies. Temporary alliances and short-lived communities can be formed across class interests on the basis of shared mythological images of reality. For tracing the genealogy of Polish expectations I have chosen three areas: the idea of the nation which has organized Polish political thought for the last two centuries, the Marxist concept of life and its failure, and the idea of solidarity which has been behind the most important event in the recent political history of the country.

The Myth of the Unity of the Nation The unity of the nation is a tacit assumption in all the political discussions which have taken place in the last two hundred years in Poland. People who have criticized the nation and who have praised it have shared the conviction that there exists a clear set of values and beliefs which constitutes the national character. This idea has had such an overwhelming influence that no social movement has dared to

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question it. Usually, the subject of the argument has been the assessment of national values in certain historical circumstances and the discussion has pointed out the necessity of radical changes in what could be termed the Polish soul. These changes, however, were intended to reconstitute the same, unified but improved, Polish nation. In this sense, we would agree with Maria Janion’s thesis that these were the Romantic tropes which constituted Polish consciousness until the early 1990s. Even fierce critics of the ideology of the Polish nation carried out their critique “from within”. They accepted the implicit premise that the only point of reference for national discourse is the nation itself. The nation, to use a Bakhtinian category, was given. It was impossible to conceive of the nation as a task to be solved in the process of negotiation. The splinters in this national discourse were made by representatives of two radical political options: the conservatives and the radical Marxists. Polish conservatives were trapped in the dilemma which originated in the late Enlightenment, when Polish intellectuals had to confront a double task. On the one hand, they worked out, in accordance with the prevailing trend of their period embodied in the French Revolution, a new idea of “nation” understood as a continuity of tradition, particularity of customs, and a special morality. On the other hand, they attempted to impose social and political reforms which were to introduce patterns dictated by Reason.16 The first idea stressed the character of the nation, the second identified the nation with a family of nations as subjects with the same laws and rights. Proponents of the first view should have formed the conservative camp, and adherents of the second the progressive wing in Polish social life. The loss of independence, however, complicated these relationships. Stress on the uniqueness of the Polish nation was a characteristic of the revolutionaries, who advocated struggle against the foreign powers, while Polish conservatives had to confront a difficult choice: to be loyal to the authorities or to give up the idea of preserving the status quo and to fight for independence. In the first case they had to betray the nation, in the second, their conservative credo.17 Only a few decided to follow the first alternative and to sacrifice the nation to the general discourse of resistance to Revolution. At the end of the nineteenth century Polish Marxists had to confront almost the same situation. Their choice was between following the idea of universal emancipation through the activity of the working class or the nation’s sovereignty as the most important direction of politics. The latter alternative meant that the universality of emancipation should be subordinated to the particular purpose of national liberation. Rosa Luxemburg, who was the main proponent of the priority of class

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struggle over national liberation, grounded her standpoint in the theoretical discourse of Marxist philosophy as well as in the empirical analysis of the political situation in the Polish Kingdom. She was convinced that, according to Marxism, the emancipation of the working class would have a universal character. The national problem would cease to exist because it was constituted by the contradictions within bourgeois society. This analysis was confirmed in her opinion by the loyalty of the Polish bourgeoisie to the Tsarist regime (the first modern Polish nationalist party – National Democracy – was pro-Russian) and the relative indifference of the Polish working class to nationalist ideology. However, as is well known, the national question brought about a split in the Polish workers’ movement, and the vast majority of them turned out to be loyal to the nation rather then to the slogans of World Revolution. These two histories (and it would be possible to find similar splits in other imported ideologies, for instance liberalism) show how prevalent the national issue was in organizing the intellectual space of political discourse. In the next part I will try to show the historical reasons for such this prevalence. The loss of independence at the end of the eighteenth century meant that the modern idea of the nation was forged in conditions in which it became necessary to defend the rudiments of nationhood. In the absence of a national state, nationalism could not develop as a political discourse proper, but instead was elevated to the level of a sacred ideal detached from any mundane circumstances. Polish Messianism seemed to be a “natural” way to solve the problem of relationships between the two orders: the “sacred”, in which Poland acted as a chosen nation, and the “normal”, in which the Poles were obliged to build their identity through grassroots work, attempting to take advantage of shifts in the power relations in Europe.18 Poland could achieve the status of a “normal” nation only through radical changes in Europe, imagined as a new and just order. This idea contains, of course, the concept of the catastrophe, the ultimate annihilation of existing political and social relationships. A Polish prayer as written by Adam Mickiewicz begs for “the great war of the peoples.” From this perspective, Poland differs from its neighbors in that it implicitly participates in the higher order whereas they have to remain on the mundane level. Somewhat ironically, while those others worked on the development of state administration and the expansion of their empires, Poles had to concentrate their energy on liberating the whole of Europe. The moral superiority of the Polish nation was thus an essential element of the vision of history which became a consolation in the

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miserable circumstances. The underpinning of the nation with the Messianic historiography was in harmony with Roman Catholicism in the sense that secular activity was subordinated to the higher order. This distinction also could serve as a tool of national identification in a situation when both of Poland’s most dangerous neighbors (Prussia and Russia) were identified with the Protestant and Russian Orthodox Churches. The Protestant faith with its stress on labour as the sign of salvation and the Orthodox Church, with its idea of the unity of state and church, seemed, for different reasons, to reject this split between the two orders which constituted the idea of the Polish nation. The picture so far can be represented by pairs of oppositions: we/others; sacred/secular orders; redemption/political strategy; Catholicism/Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy; madness/rationality. The last opposition needs explaining: I refer to Maria Janion’s book in which she presents two major literary tropes existing in Polish Romanticism. The first is “patriot-madman,” the second is “vampire.” The crucial idea of the book is to show the state of consciousness in which Poland becomes a dark but powerful force destroying all other feelings and emotions. In the extreme case a Polish patriot turns into either a suicide ( tension directed to the inside) or a bloodthirsty vampire (tension directed to the outside), and in both cases is overwhelmed by the spectre of Polishness.19 If modernization required giving up the residues of mythic and irrational thinking in the name of rationality, it had to mean, in Polish circumstances, giving up nationality understood as described above. The dilemma was reflected in the debates over positivism at the end of the nineteenth century. Proponents of Positivism and their followers were accused of treason for their attempts to open up the Polish style of thinking. The most spectacular case was connected with the name of a Polish writer, Stanislaw Brzozowski who was charged with being a secret agent of the tsarist secret service, “Ochrana.” The validity of the allegations is still very unclear but the case has become a symbol of the drama of Polish intellectuals. Brzozowski was one of the boldest critics of the Romantic tradition, which he saw as an antiquated and empty discourse blocking the way to a real exchange of ideas with the rest of Europe.20 The case of Brzozowski as well as his philosophy shows how easily the question of openness to the outer intellectual world could clash with the need to sustain national identity. The sense of the nation was permeated with the fear of what was beyond – Europe and modernity. And the pattern of oppositions – modernity/tradition; Europe/Poland; rational world/ mythological world – pertained.

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Paradoxically, however, one of the most important of Polish endeavours was to prove our rootedness in Europe. Hence the common image of Poland as a bulwark of Christianity defending the Christian West from the pagan East. This idea extended also to a confrontation with Russia, in which case Poland was supposed to be a bulwark of Latin civilization as opposed to Byzantine. Fear of the cosmopolitan West and the simultaneous sense of belonging to Western civilization is, we believe, a paradox of temporalitites. The fear of modernized Europe emerged from the belief that traditions that ground the sense of Polishness are fixed and stable, as if Poland managed to retain the core of Western civilisation – its Christian aspect. In this sense Poland could conceive of itself as the deepest and innermost image of Europeanness, a quality hidden elsewhere by the layers of time. After the Second World War, when Poland, according to the Yalta agreement, was supposed to stay in the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, the Poles remained roughly speaking in the mood I have described above. The majority of them were not aware of the consequences of the new rule which, on the one hand, was to destroy a lot of traditional Polish mentality, while on the other to keep some elements of it frozen. In order to explain this paradox I would like, first, to focus on the particularities of communist modernization and then to show its implications for the changes in the Polish frame of mind. Communism for most East European countries (maybe with the exception of the Czech Republic and East Germany) meant, besides many other things, the invasion of mass modernization. In spite of the beginnings of industrialization, before the Second World War Poland was only at the edge of modernity. German rule and the Soviet invasion had destroyed processes leading to the restructuring of society in the direction of a free-market economy and political democracy. Unfortunately, the question of whether Poland would have been able to achieve this level or would have had to adopt a system similar to those of some South American countries, with an unstable economy and fragile democracy, has to remain in the sphere of political fiction. What occurred in fact was a rapid, communist modernization which despite common features with the West had its own specificity. Of course, it is not possible to give here a full account of the process, so I would like to limit myself to the problems connected with the implications of this kind of modernity for Polish consciousness. Peculiarities of the communist process of modernization can account for a great deal of political and social life in contemporary Poland. As is well known, communist power promoted rapid industrialization which

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was aimed both at direct and indirect development of the military complex and at changes in the social structure. The final result of this social shift was to establish a strong working class which was supposed to become a basis for communist rule. Thus, from the beginning the main purpose of modernization was the reproduction of political power. On the other hand, rapid industrialization brought about social phenomena which bore some resemblance to those taking place in the Western countries. Some of them, such as secularization and the breakdown of traditional social structures, were accepted to a large extent by state authorities. Others, above all an individual’s chance of liberation from fixed social relationships, caused a lot of trouble for them and required active countermeasures. There are great numbers of analyses of the totalitarian state system that put the emphasis on the controlling function of the state. It is obvious that the administrative system dominated the economic one to a point at which one can speak of the absorption of the economy by politics. Members of society depended almost entirely on the power of bureaucracy, which appeared to be in control of all available goods. People knew modernization only as “administrative modernization” and often perceived political problems in terms of the fairness of the ruling bureaucracy. In other words, people tended to focus on problems of distribution rather than those of production. The political slogan “Socialism – yes, distortions of socialism – no” reflected this attitude. It was used commonly both by new leaders to discredit their predecessors and by protesting workers to justify their opposition to the system. Besides such unusual situations, the system imposed two patterns of behavior on communal life. On the one hand, it forced massive identification with the system in the sense that everyone had to accept the rules, at least to some extent, in order to survive. On the other, however, people took every opportunity to retreat into the private sphere. Family life and personal relations were felt to lie beyond the sphere of social obligations and formed a realm of personal autonomy. The other strategy was to withdrew into pre-modern forms of life. The role of the Catholic Church in Poland can be accounted for at least in some respects in this way. The cultural sphere, and especially high culture, went far beyond only aesthetic values. It became a domain of confrontation between different social and political perspectives that could not be expressed in any other way. Polish political life was frozen in post-war circumstances, frozen in the sense that real political differentiation had almost nothing in common with formal political participation in communist organizations,

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at least until the rise of the political underground movement, i.e., until the mid seventies. It was possible to find within the Communist Party people from leftist to extremely nationalistic orientations. Not being able to present their political views openly, they tried to smuggle in their personal points of view as merely different opinions on historical topics. Another dimension of this feature was the Communist Party’s attempts to “colonize” the past. Traditionally, we had two main trends in Polish history, one which saw the main country’s enemy as lying in the East, and the second which considered Germany to be the main threat for the nation. The Communist Party subscribed to the second view but it had been developed by the nationalistic and bourgeois movement in pre-war Poland. So as the communist slogans began to lose their power, the Party used nationalistic rhetoric more and more extensively. This rhetoric, however, could not be taken to its logical conclusion because then the dominant position of the Soviet Union would be called into question. This discussion on historical issues became even more vivid after the transformation. The first reaction was to return to the pre-war political reality, resurrecting the argumentation and the ideas supporting it. I think that the most important event from this point of view was the discussion of the so-called “return” to Europe. The proponents of this slogan tried to persuade us that the history of Poland was closely connected with the history of Europe, except for a brief break during the communist period. Coming back to Europe was to mean the adoption, or strictly speaking the readoption, of the values and social and political institutions of Western civilization. Opponents of such an idea of Polish history laid emphasis on the particularity of the history of the country, and tried to show that the exceptional character of Polish fate had made it possible to preserve and develop values forgotten or neglected in the West. This discussion to some extent reflected Romantic attitudes in Polish thought which I have referred to above. In the Romantic period Poland, then under the rule of Russia, Austria and Prussia, was perceived by some Polish thinkers as the “Messiah of Nations” in the sense that the necessary condition of her regaining independence would be to break down those conservative states, which would mean freedom for the whole of Europe. This attitude was resurrected by events of the decade of the 1980s. Poland was seen as the hero of anti-totalitarian movements in the socialist camp and as the first victim of repression in the imposition of martial law in 1981. When the chance to dismantle the totalitarian state appeared again in 1989, many people expected a reward for their stubborn resistance against the communist state. They felt that

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Poland should be rewarded by massive international aid from Western countries. When, for many reasons, this did not occur, resentment against the West rose again. The history of Poland was portrayed as a chain of sacrifices on Poland’s part and betrayals by Western countries. This argument alluded to the Polish uprisings against Russian rule in the nineteenth century, the Yalta agreement, and events even further in the past. The moral result of this reasoning was a serious doubt whether Poland should follow Western culture and politics in every respect. Therefore we have again to deal with the problem that was so vivid during last two hundred years of Polish history. But to some extent Marx’s observation of tragedy turning into the grotesque seems to be true in the case of Poland. When in 1990 the government changed the law concerning gambling to allow only Polish capital to be invested in casinos, the Austrian ambassador protested in the name of Austrian investors. At this one of the leading Polish right-wing politicians answered angrily that now we are not in the eighteenth century when a foreign power could dictate policy to Polish authorities. Of course it is hard to say that we are dealing in the Polish case only with a set of prejudices and “ideological” fears. The resistance to the “return to Europe” is very important for some groups for economic reasons. The most clear case is that of peasantry and the political activity of the Peasant Party. The traditional structure of agriculture in Poland is really endangered by the process of transformation. To defend the existing relationships it is necessary to introduce special taxes for food and a system of state protected prices which in turn are a big burden for the state budget. To justify this policy, the Peasant Party extensively uses the rhetoric of traditional values and extols peasants as the most important part of the nation. The workers of huge state-owned factories, which are inefficient in a free market economy, have to face, to some extent, the same troubles. Here we have again a mixture of traditional nationalistic ideology and some kind of communist nostalgia. This interesting amalgamate seems to mean paradoxically a post-mortem victory for communist ideology in the form it took in Poland. This is a victory in two senses: first, the adoption of certain elements of nationalcommunist ideology by large groups; second, the appropriation of the view that Western modernization associated with a free-market economy has to be treated as a threat more grave than communist modernization. The greastest difference with the communist period consists in the role of the Catholic Church. Before, it was suppressed and in opposition to the state; now it is trying to achieve an important position in the political discourse. For this reason, Church populism, in

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alliance with the rest of Solidarity, has to struggle with the populism of the post-communist party (Social Democracy of the Polish Republic). The Church attacks this party not only for being a continuation of communist styles of thinking (for its totalitarianism and promotion of the secularization of society) but also for being liberal and forgetting the real needs of “people of labour.” The Poles, it is often said, are prone to be pessimistic about their future. It has been remarked that it is advantageous to be a Cassandra in Poland because the prediction of disaster is most likely to be born out. Pessimism has arisen out of the historical experience of being betrayed but to some extent it also has its sources in the idea of Polish history I have outlined above. Locating the mission of the nation above the level of the mundane was bound to result in constant disappointment with real solutions in real circumstances, which, even if very positive, never fulfill hopes and expectations. This mood prevailed with the regaining of Polish independence after the First World War and is now recuring again, especially among intellectuals. The strange question “Does Poland deserve independence?”, is posed seriously, which, I think, is a sign of dissatisfaction with turning the myth of the unity of the nation and its historical mission into the everyday reality of low political games full of dirty tricks and cynical moves. Poland was betrayed but also betrayed itself. Such an attitude results in a feeling of hopelessness and a tendency to withdraw from political and social life. Even if we do agree that the level of political discourse in Poland is relatively low it is hard to say that it is dramatically degraded. The political life in Poland can be seen in this way only against the background of the myths developed at the period of the first Solidarity as a continuation of the Polish tradition. The other source of disappointment, and consequently of pessimism, has arisen out of the shattering of the liberal illusion of the possibility of rapid modernization of Poland. As that attempt was to a great extent rejected, the nation was blamed as being not progressive enough to accept this strategy. This charge was fair because, as I have shown earlier, political life in Poland was clouded by the extensive usage of myths from the past and remnants of the communist ideology. Polish liberals, however, did little to understand the complexity of the common people’s situation in the period of transition and did not take into account their convoluted state of mind. The liberals’ emphasis on individualistic values fulfilled in the free-market economy had to clash with the idea of the unity of the nation, the Catholic Church’s teaching and the communist dogma of the economic equality of people. At the

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ideological level they have fallen into the same trap as their opponents from the conservative camp, for they believed that the unity of people in the struggle against the totalitarian state could be translated into positive support for free-market economic reforms. So if pessimism has its sources in mythological thinking about the mission and character of the nation, is it possible to find any chance for optimism? Do the Poles have to repeat the same mistakes and remain in the same ideological triangle between the conservative idea of traditional values, the idea of modernization, and a better or worse populism, which in fact express the same myth of the unity of nation? The answer is difficult, because the Polish political scene is still very unclear and the existing political parties do not reflect the real interests of people. This rejection of present political representation could result in new ways of thinking, more suitable for current circumstances. It could also, which would be worse, lead to the dominance of populism combined with an impoverished version of traditional values. This latter outcome is much less likely, in spite of some attempts to revive such an ideology, because even now we can observe changes in social attitudes which reflect the effects of openness to the processes ongoing in Western countries. We can, however, ask whether destroying the old myths should not produce a new mythology. But that is another story.

Marxism as a Way of Life: The Failure of an Impossible Project It is obvious that Marxism has influenced the lives of millions of individuals in the last hundred and fifty years. Its enormous influence has provoked a series of dramatic discussions on the content and proper form of this philosophy. These arguments have never had only a purely intellectual character. Everybody who decided or was driven in the argument by historical circumstances had to set up his or her opinion against the background of fundamental existential options. At the same time, however, both supporters and adversaries of Marxism tended to see this philosophy as an attempt to embody Historical Reason. The quasi-religious character of Marxist philosophy was observed from the beginnings but it was conceived as a holistic belief about the utmost end and mechanism of history. If this vision of Marxism was to be of crucial importance, then individuals’ choices would be thought to lose their significance. The mechanism of history does not need any emotional involvement. On the other hand, only through the millions of individual

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decisions would Marxism as a political vision be able to impose a certain shape on society. These decisions themselves, however, were entirely outside the interest of Marxist theory; they were shamefully omitted and never mentioned as a theoretical problem. This paradox penetrated the whole history of Marxism and endowed it with inescapable ambiguity. This ambiguity was not overcome even by the proponents of the socalled “anthropocentic” interpretation of Marxism. The supporters of this vision placed the human individual at the centre of Marxist theory but they made the individual important from the point of view of the logic of history, of the perspective of the end of alienation. This Marxism was not a philosophy which helped an individual to make her or his life meaningful. It was rather a vision of the way in which an abstract individual, an embodiment of “human nature”, could harmonize the empirical conditions of his existence with the promise of this ultimate liberation of mankind.21 It was relatively easy to show that the theoretical structure of Marxist theory justified such treatment of an individual. Marxism is mainly a philosophy of history, of the development of humankind. The argument within Marxism was always about the crucial elements of these developments and their purpose, which was the most important. Therefore, the effort of thinkers, such as Erich Fromm or Herbert Marcuse, who attempted to supplement Marxism with the psychological concepts of psychoanalysis, were to a great extent futile. They were able to show that radical change in the economic structure of society was not enough in itself to fulfill the eschatological promise of Marxism. Nonetheless, they had to retain the general structure of Marxism with its total vision of history where an individual is merely a pretext for the activity of a universal mechanism of liberation. The individual remained an empty space which had to be filled by external forces, a combination of economics and psychoanalysis. I have more fully elaborated the problem of the individual in the “anthropocentic” interpretation of Marxism because other forms of this philosophy explicitly rejected any form of individualism. The subject of Marxist philosophy is history or the working class or the forces of production but not the individual as a human being in his or her existential situation. The theoretical justification of this understanding of the status of the individual in theory is, of course, famously, Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feurbach. “But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations”.22 Even a superficial overview of Marx’s work allows us to find a number of remarks warning against the isolation of human individuals from

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social relations. In the course of maturing his theory, Marx gave social relations more and more specific forms. Eventually, they appeared as the forces of production on the one hand, and the political mechanism of class struggle on the other. These forces by themselves were never able to set up and maintain the motion of social changes. So the history of Marxism as a social movement in its various expressions has been the history of an impossible task: the constitution of the subject on the basis of Marxist philosophy. The task is impossible because this philosophy was outwardly hostile to the construction of subjectivity via the individual. But this model of subjectivity was a must, because people have to construct their lives in a subjective mode; they, if they are not philosophers, seek way of relating their activity to the universal aims of the historical development. I would like to show in this chapter some nodal points of coping with this task in the history of Marxism, especially Marxism as embodied in the state in the countries of the socalled communist system. First, however, I would like to come back for a moment to Marx himself and discuss some potentialities in his philosophy which have never been adequately developed. It was not surprising that the subject of Marx’s doctoral dissertation was “The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature”. Though inspired by Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, he sought in atomism the philosophy which could locate the individual in the broader landscape of a philosophical system which describes the laws of Nature. He turned to Greek philosophy, because he expected to find in it the most immediate relationship between philosophy, the natural world and the individual. He observed the contradiction inscribed in this relationship: [That] as the world becomes philosophical, philosophy also becomes worldly, that its realization is also its loss, that what it struggles against on the outside is its own inner deficiency, that in the very struggle it falls precisely into those defects which it fights as defects in the opposite camp, and that it can only overcome these defects by failing into them. … This is the one side, when we consider this matter purely objectively as immediate realization of philosophy … [I]t has also a subjective aspect, which is merely another form of it. This is the relationship of the philosophical system which is realized to its intellectual carriers, to the individual self-consciousnesses in which its progress appears … [T]hese individual self-consciousnesses always carry a double-edged demand, one edge turned against the world, the other against philosophy itself … [W]hat in the thing itself appears as a relationship inverted in itself, appears in these selfconsciousnesses as a double one, a demand and an action contradicting each other. Their liberation of the world from un-philosophy is at same time their own liberation from the philosophy that held them in fetters as a particular system.23

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In the chapter on meteors Marx compares Democritean and Epicurean attitudes to the natural world. The latter is a realization of the principle of individual abstract self-consciousness which opposes any generality. A consequence of this attitude is that science is impossible because it appears only as universality. At the same time, however, reality that transcends an individual self-consciousness is crushed and falls apart. On the other hand, if a universal self-consciousness, recognizing itself only in the form of generality, becomes the basic principle, then according to Marx the gate to superstition and slavish mysticism is open. An example of such an attitude is stoic philosophy. So at the beginnings of Marxist philosophy the dramatic dilemma appeared of whether philosophy should proceed along the way of an individual consciousness accepting its individuality as a principle, or withdraw from individuality and raise subjectivity to the rank of universality. Marx seems to accept the Epicurean way of doing philosophy with its stress on individual selfconsciousness as the principle and its consequent neglect of science. I think that, paradoxically, the development of Marxist philosophy if considered from this point of view went rather the “stoic” way then the Epicurean one. I do not intend here to discuss this philosophy at length as this has already been done several times. In the contradictory interpretations of Marxism there are few things that are agreed on, but one of them is that the acting consciousness is the consciousness of a collective subject. This collective consciousness is, of course, not the abstract general consciousness which Marx ascribes to stoic philosophy. It is a consciousness of the social classes distinguished on the basis of the division of labour in society. As a carrier of the historical process this consciousness has to appear as universal and general. Therefore, from the point of view of Marxist theory the individual self-consciousness is meaningless; it has to be dissolved in the mechanism of historical progress. Unlike the Stoics, Marx never developed a concept of the ethical dimension of human existence. What he did in relation to the individual was a kind of mixture of the eschatological promise of communism and a concrete analysis of the political struggles of his epoch. So on the one hand Marx describes in the Grundrisse an individual who is liberated from the fetters of forced labor. Such an individual works only for a small part of the day, devoting the rest of his time to artistic creativity as playing musical instruments, writing poems and so on. On the other, He draws in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte a portrait of a political activist handling his personality as a kind of expression of the mechanism of the class struggle. Individual existence remains beyond the theoretical interest of the founder of Marxism.

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This attitude in theory was to bound to come into conflict with the demands of the social movement which Marx intended to influence. When the workers’ movement adopted Marxist theory the need for clear forms of subjectivity became more and more urgent. The need was met in Engels’ later work where he took on the task of popularizing the theory and guarding its purity. In Anti-Dühring and in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State he tried to cope with the problems concerning the private lives of individuals. Private life was considered an expression of the general laws of history or suitable examples for illustration of Marxist theory. For instance, the relationship between man and woman was inscribed in the “metanarrative” of class struggle: The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. … [Monogamy] is the cellular form of civilized society, in which we can already study the nature of the antagonisms and contradictions which develop fully in the latter.24

So when Engels wrote extensively on woman’s liberation he saw it conditioned on the universal liberation of mankind through the struggle of the proletariat. In more general terms, in Anti-Dühring he describes: all moral theories [as] … the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time … As society has … moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or, ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed.25

From this perspective, any kind of subjectivization is dependent on the macro-level of historical changes. An individual is not able to achieve a certain kind of autonomy which could motivate him for activity other than involvement in the political struggle. His or her personality traits seem relevant only in so far as they coincide with the requirements of the class struggle at a certain point in the development of society. For the sake of clarity, I will not to discuss here the problem of the importance of the objective factor in historical development versus the subjective one. The only point I want to make here is that individual development is entirely subordinated to the logic of the class struggle, which in turn is held to be an expression of the laws of history. Then the most important task of implementing these laws in the world of social reality would rest on the shoulders of the leaders of the revolution, the communists. “[T]he Communist[s] … are … the most advanced and

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resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others … [T]hey have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”26 The communists are responsible for representing the interest of “the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality” and “the interests of the movement as a whole.”27 This logic should have led to investing the communists with a special status, but this was never stated explicitly by Marx and Engels. They of course avoided giving to the leaders of the proletariat the features of supermen. The communists were presented rather as having special cognitive abilities arising from having adopted Marxist theory. So if we would like to speak of any special ethics included in Marxist-Engelian philosophy it would be linked to the most progressive part of humankind. They could be the bearers of the new morality but rather through their role in changing social reality than their character as people possessing special virtues. This attitude was recognized by Lenin and universalized in the idea of the vanguard party that could convey class political consciousness to the workers. In one of his the most important works, What Is to Be Done?, written in 1902, Lenin combined Marxist theory with the experience of the anarchist terrorism of Russian organizations as Narodnaya Vola, Zemlya i Volya, and Chernyi Peredel. What was most important for these organizations was the ethical opposition to the Tsarist regime. They perceived themselves as a chosen few who had an obligation to liberate the masses from their oppressive situation. This ethical motivation gave rise to the need for a special type of highly integrated personality entirely subordinated to the task of terrorist political activity but understood as an expression of ethical values. Lenin attempted to overcome the alienation of this handful of intellectuals and make them real leaders of the masses. From the perspective of our problem, that of subjectivization, Lenin converted an ethical involvement into a cognitive one. Leaders organized in the vanguard party and armed with theory which could account for the explanation of the current social situation and progressive trends would bring the proper class consciousness to the masses. This ploy of Lenin had far-reaching consequences. It made the Party the collective consciousness of the leaders of the proletariat. In this way Lenin solved the puzzle which was intrinsic in Marx and Engels’ philosophy. They had showed that the recognition of theory could lead to success in the class struggle. However, they failed in the transformation of the theory into a signpost for life. The theory had to remain at a very high level of

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abstract historiosophy and could not help in everyday decisions. Lenin showed that such a translation of theory into life-decisions was possible by introducing a mediator in the form of the Party. The Party was a collective bearer of theory but also the regulator of the individual lives of people involved. Therefore, party discipline became the most important feature of Lenin’s model of the revolutionary organization. He fiercely denounced the futile democracy of Western European Social Democratic parties, opposing to them the ideal of an organization of professional revolutionaries: The only serious organizational principle for the active workers of our movement should be the strictest secrecy, the strictest selection of members, and the training of professional revolutionaries … It would be a great mistake to believe that the impossibility of establishing real “democratic”control renders the members of the revolutionary organization beyond control altogether. They have not the time to think about toy forms of democratism (democratism within a close and compact body of comrades in which complete, mutual confidence prevails), but they have a lively sense of their responsibility, knowing as they do from experience that an organization of real revolutionaries will stop at nothing to rid itself of an unworthy member.28

If we look at the relationship between an individual and the party, we can easily see that for an individual life the most important thing is a feeling of intimacy. People who participate in the party are connected through their immersion in the community and the acceptance of community ideals. Lenin rejected democratic procedures because they would disturb that feeling and expose the party to the outer world. Paradoxically, participation in the party becomes a kind of initiation in a Gnostic circle where the very idea of participation is the most important bond of a community. The Marxist theory is taken for granted and it seems not to play an important role in the creation of the circle of professional revolutionaries. So again in Lenin we have the recreation of the problem which we encountered in Marx and Engels’s thought, namely, the possibility of transforming the cognitive structures of the theory into the practice of everyday life. At the theoretical level Lenin solved this problem by investing the Party with special power; at the level of practical activity he solved it by emphasizing the intimate bond among the revolutionaries and the discipline arising from this bond. In political reality this intimate connection meant obedience to the leaders of the Party. From the point of view of an individual involved it took the form of absolute sacrifice of life to the higher purpose. As Lenin rejected any kind of practices which could “objectivize” the existential situation of people doing revolutionary activity, they were forced to rely on their intuitions and emotions. This in turn formed the basis for the blind

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obedience to their leaders as the bearers of the Theory. However, for precisely this reason, the political activity itself, the bond between the professional revolutionaries, became more important than the cognitive structure of Marxism. Thus, paradoxically, the style of life seems to have become of the greatest importance. It decides the effectiveness of political activity because it depends on the attitudes of the members of the revolutionary organization. Nevertheless, Lenin, like Marx and Engels before him, did not elaborate this aspect. He seemed to have believed that party discipline plus the consciousness of the common purpose should be enough for the organization of the revolutionaries. I think that he thought this for two reasons. First, Lenin accepted the idea that Marxism should be devoid of any kind of normativity. Normative ethics was identified with rigorous Christian morality based on the Ten Commandments. Ethical alternatives to Christianity such as Kantian rationalism and Utilitarism also could not be accepted because they gave absolute, ahistorical answers to ethical questions. Marxism identifies ethics on the one hand with the historical circumstances of given epochs, and on the other with the progressive tendencies marked by its historiosophy. Any kind of fixed practices would contradict these conceptions. Self-conscious party members should be open to their historical milieu and know how to interpret the progressive trends in history. They did not need special individual practices which would help them in their revolutionary activity. On the contrary, Lenin was very suspicious of the terrorist organizations where the practices of individuals were the most important part of the activity. Niechayev’s famous Catechism of a Revolutionist presented a catalogue of traits of character and practices which were described as indispensable for the enemies of the existing order. Lenin, who knew these people very well (his brother was a member of such an organization and was executed for his involvement in terrorist activity), rejected this idea on the basis of a Marxist theory of organizing the masses. Second, Lenin tailored the ideal organization according to Russian circumstances where, faced with a severely oppressive regime, a handful of socialist activists knew each other very well. The intimate bond of common feelings and emotions was the most important factor in forming their identity as revolutionaries. In such a close community there was no need to discuss the forms of the relationships and practices of self-control and selfdevelopment. Such a community, while this was never clearly stated by Lenin, could form the seed of the new communist society of a real brotherhood of people.

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Lenin started the task of building the new society during and after the Revolution, and he was conscious that this new society needed new forms of life. In the paper “A Great Beginning” he outlined the task of the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle. He enumerated two tasks. Firstly: [the proletariat must] win over the entire mass of the working and exploited people; it must win them over, organize them and lead them in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and utterly suppress their resistance. Secondly, it must lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people, as well as all the petty-bourgeois groups, on the road of new economic development, towards the creation of a new social bond, a new labor discipline, a new organization of labor, which will combine the last word in science and capitalist technology with the mass association of class conscious workers creating largescale socialist industry.29

It is clear that Lenin repeated the previous ambivalence of the Marxist approach to the style of life in his post-revolutionary work. On the one hand, he was sure that the superiority of socialism could be proved by winning the economic competition with the capitalist states. So he stressed the organization of labour which should mimic that of capitalism. On the other hand, however, he believed in the new style of life which would also be associated with labour. For this reason he valued “communist subbotniks” very highly, as he saw in them nuclei of the new way of life. Subbotniks (from subbota, the Russian word for Saturday) originated in the spontaneous initiative of a group of railway workers who decided to work without pay, on behalf of victory over the White forces. This movement became widespread and was taken under party sponsorship. Lenin observed in this movement a new attitude to work and to the relationship between work and leisure time. Work time and leisure time did not have to oppose each other, they could supplement each other; and through this process the alienation of labour could eventually vanish. Lenin attempted to find in everyday life some signs of progressive changes which he called shoots of communism. Besides subbotniks he enumerated also: [P]ublic catering establishment, nurseries, kindergartens [where] we have examples of these shoots … everyday means involving nothing pompous, grandiloquent or ceremonial which can really emancipate women, really lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life. These means are not new, they (like all the material prerequisites for socialism) were created by large-scale capitalism. But, under capitalism they remained, first, a rarity, and secondly … either profit-making enterprises … or “acrobatics of bourgeois charity”.30

So these new forms of life were in fact the continuation of processes already initiated in the capitalist society. They should, however, change

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and expand in the new conditions of the communist society. Again Lenin did not see the problem as changes in new practices but rather in whole new structure of society. In this new structure the progressive trends already existing in the previous society because of technological development could fulfill themselves in complete form without the restrictions imposed on them by capitalist forms of social interaction. It is interesting that Lenin also included a new character of labour as expressed in subbotniks in this general category. New approaches to work could have been an example of practices never existing in previous societies. Such a conceptualization would, however, violate the dogmas of Marxist theory. It might contradict the general idea that social processes are initiated in lower formations but that they find their full expression in higher, more progressive formations. This concept secured the objectivity of the historical process. The October Revolution was perceived by Lenin as an event which was in full agreement with the idea of objectivity in history, so the new society initiated by it should also develop according to theoretical principles. So the only real practices Lenin mentions in this text which did not refer to capitalism are of a political character: The great beginnings, the ‘communist subbotnik’, must also be utilized for another purpose, namely, to purge the Party … We must continue the purge, and that new beginning, the ‘communist subbotniks’, must be utilized for this purpose: members should be accepted into the Party only after six months’, say, “trial”, or “probation”, at “working in a revolutionary way”. A similar test should be demanded of all members of the Party who joined after October 25, 1917, and who have not proved by some special work or service that they are absolutely reliable, loyal and capable of being Communists.31

Lenin thus presupposed then a radical politicization of this new way of life. As it itself seemed to be a continuation of a tendency already existing in capitalist society, its significance for the new, communist society consisted in the function it could fill in political identification and petrifiction of this society. This idea reveals Lenin’s obsession with the importance of the political sphere of society. The political is the fundament of society and political practices exert a decisive influence on its remaining fragments and not vice versa. Lenin transferred the model of a Party of professional revolutionaries into a post-revolutionary society. The Party was to consist of the same kind of people but it had to play a different function. After the Revolution it should be a model of communist organization, a model which could inspire people to change their lives. Lenin seemed to tend towards converting Russian society into a kind of Party, a professional organization of communists bound

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together by the intimate bond of the comrades struggling for the same cause. Having this model in mind he could not encourage people to develop a set of normative practices which would organize their habits of life. In theoretical terms Lenin identified communist morality with “the proletariat’s class struggle”. He claimed that “[O]ur morality stems from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat”.32 So if morality is subordinated to the class struggle and there is no such thing as an ahistorical ethical code then morality is a practical realization of this struggle and its only positive meaning is to be functional in building the economic basis for the communist society. Lenin thus enumerated those two tasks as the most important ones for communist youth. They should fight against foreign intervention and they should work to make the country richer. He pointed to the task of electrification as the most important for the well-being of Soviet Russia. This concrete enterprise was so important because its realization was supposed to change all the economic relations between people and by the same token their morality as well. But morality itself became dissolved in economic and political relationships. Individual decisions and ways of life had to be subordinated to the higher purposes of the total reconstruction of society, which in turn was to change individuals and their behavior. Marx in his “Third Thesis on Feurbach” observes that: The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice.33

Since the times when it became necessary to translate this statement into the demands of practical life, the most difficult issue has been the question of what really revolutionizing practice meant. This practice is obvious when revolutions happen, when the whole society is transformed and people are aware of the transformation. At this very moment the unity of changing the social landscape and the lives of people involved is obvious and such a transformation has been frequently observed. But the question arises whether a revolutionary situation can be extended and become a part of the everyday life of millions of people for longer periods of time. Lenin, to a certain extent, seemed to believe so. He thought that some forms of revolutionary activity could be petrified and become a part of everyday life. On the

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other hand, building up a new, communist society should generate new habits which would widen the are of communist morality in the social life of society. I think that this project of Lenin (developed in accordance with Marx’s intuition) was a great failure. This was a failure which would contribute to the collapse of the communist project in general. To account for this failure I would like to turn to Michel Foucault’s ideas on ethics and morality as they were developed in the last period of his work. Foucault distinguishes two different kinds of ethics. The first (sometimes referred to as “morality”) is a system or code of rules which describes precisely what an individual should and should not do. In the application of such a code, an individual is denied any independent initiative to negotiate the rules of his or her conduct. The second (referred to as “ethics”) gives an individual the right to create himself or herself in relation to the rules accepted in a certain culture and society. In order to describe the latter type of ethics, Foucault develops the concept of “technologies of the self”. This means a set of practices which “permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality”.34 Pursuing this project Foucault investigates different techniques used in Antiquity and early Christianity by individuals to transform their own behavior, and to seek actively the fulfillment of moral principles. Therefore, Foucault seems to empower the subject and give him the capacity to alter his environment as well as himself. Some commentators on Foucault’s work have argued that this standpoint is at odds with his earlier position, one in which he stresses the helplessness of the subject vis-à-vis the juridical-discursive power of the state. Foucault himself emphasizes the continuity of his work, which describes the modes of individuation as a culturally anchored process. He argues that “if I am now interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture as proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group”.35 Not only are the principles of morality culturally produced, but the methods of their appropriation are culturally mediated as well. From the point of view of the formation of the self, historical epochs differ on the proposed forms of handling the culture itself. Sometimes, individuals are encouraged to build up their personalities as a kind of creation, choosing and adopting

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existing principles of morality; sometimes they are forced to submit obediently to these principles. Therefore, when Foucault discusses four conditions of his approach to ethics (the ethical substance, the mode of subjectivization, the self-forming activity, and the telos of the ethical change) he is concerned mainly to show the amount of freedom which certain cultures give to an individual.36 If we take as an example the mode of subjectivization, Foucault insists that in Ancient Greece, no one was obliged to act ethically, but if people would like to live their lives beautifully and with glory, they consciously chose to do that. “The choice, the aesthetic choice or the political choice, for which they decide to accept this kind of existence – that’s the mode d’assujettissement. It’s a choice, it’s a personal choice.”37 It seems that this relation between the subject and the culture, which gives both the building blocks of self-creation and their means of construction, was the problem Foucault was preoccupied with in the later period of his life. The metaphor of life as a work of art is useful because it shows that the situation of the artist in relation to his or her object is the same as the situation of the self-creating subject. The artist has at his or her disposal the culturally produced materials which he or she can transform. An artist, through his or her participation in culturally defined discourses, also possesses the means of transformation. However, nobody would defend the thesis that an object of art is nothing but the mechanical transformation of available material and a transformation according to methods given in advance. There is no necessity in art, nor in self-creation: this is the crucial point for Foucault. Answering the question of his American interlocutors, who said that the Californians with their obsession with the perfect life could be a good example of an aesthetic life, Foucault clearly replies that it is not, because these people presume to “know the truth about desire, life, nature body, and so on.” Knowledge alone cannot be a basis for the formation of the self. This includes also a special kind of knowledge, namely that of oneself. Foucault rejects the notion of authenticity as a point of reference for the self. The self is an invention, not a discovery. In the context of the critique of the Sartrean concept of authenticity, Foucault claims, “we should not to have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity.”38 The invention of the self can be attached to different fields of social activity, not only to aesthetics, but also politics. It could also be connected to bodily practices such as sex, health and eating. These practices are interwoven with the practices of achieving the self.

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If we consider the Marxist project of ethics from the perspective of the Foucauldian approach, then it is clear that it had to be a failure. Lenin did not want ethics to be obedience to codices nor did he intend freedom in the creation of the individual’s own moral norm. He believed that ethical rules could arise from the social fabric of the progressing society. At some point such spontaneous norms would become a kind of quasicodex which in turn could guide the life of individuals. The reality of socialism was quite different. It turned out that there was a great need for a normative concept of morality. So very soon there started the production of various codices concerning particular groups and professions. Although this production contradicted the Marxist idea of ethics, these codices filled a real gap in the social arrangement. They were supposed to give people clear rules of behaviour, and norms of moral choices. It was, however, very difficult to find in these texts any particularity of a Marxist approach. They usually repeated banalities about honesty, loyalty, etc., which could apply as well to people in capitalist society. On the other hand, there were a great number of rituals developed in the countries of “actual socialism” which parodied the rituals of Christianity. So we had an atheistic “baptizing” of newborns, atheistic weddings, etc. In these cases the idea was to use established rituals and gave them new forms. They were bound to fail, as they could neither satisfy the needs of people attached to the “old” rituals, because of their parodic character, nor could they develop a new kind of morality demanded by the requirements of Marxist ideology. In fact, the very idea of establishing new rituals was one failure of the Marxist project of ethics. First, this failure was to acknowledge that people needed fixed rituals in order to organize their lives. This contradicted the idea that morality was the result of economic transformation and class struggle. Second, instead of a new morality arising from the activity of the vanguard workers we had forms of everyday life which were specially created and imposed from above. This kind of ritualized morality was, of course, in accordance with totalitarian communism and it perfectly served the purpose of controlling society. Paradoxically, the crucial practices of the communist movement which were defined as “criticism” and especially “self-criticism” were borrowed from the strictest form of monastic life. As techniques of building interaction within the Party they played the same role as in Christian monasteries, of aiding the control of peoples’ lives by the higher authorities. The moral of this story is, I think, clear. Marxism, at least as a kind of social practice in communist countries, never developed its own forms of subjectivization. It had to borrow the forms of social life from other

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ethical formations and attempt to adapt them to its own purposes. This was a consequence of dogmas inherent in Marxist theory. It put stress on liberation from any form of authoritarian ethics and assumed that a new morality should emerge from new political and economic relationships. Using Foucault’s terms, the new morality was supposed to appear neither as an imposition of new codices, nor as a creation of individuals. On the one hand, it was to be worked out in the collaboration between individuals directed at changing their social environment. On the other hand, this new morality was attached to truth included in Marxist theory. It was to be an embodiment of knowledge of the mechanism of historical progress. I think that these two definitions of communist morality contradicted each other and opened up a gap which had to be filled by voluntary action. Historical reality shows that this action consisted mainly of adopting older systems of morality and using them for the purpose of the imagined new society. The results of the collective action of the masses never turned out to be strong enough to create the new modes of subjectivization. The other question, of course, is whether such a morality is possible. New values and new practices which appear in the revolutionary, turning moments of history are usually fragile and susceptible to the process of petrification. They easily become empty rituals, the distant reflections of the origins or practices of individuals. They can change the concept of life but never to the point which is achieved at the peak of the social transgression. Thus they open a way to the production of new codices and to the new ways of life for individuals.

The Mythologies of Solidarity Workers’ Protest: Legitimization against Legitimization Unarguably the workers protest was the main factor in the demolition of the communist system. The massive strikes in 1980 resulted in the emergence of Solidarity, which became the turning point in the history of communism. Solidarity was the first independent social organization in communist-governed countries since the October Revolution. The importance of Solidarity consists in its having destroyed the official ideology of the communist state as a workers’ state. This ideology was the hard core of the politics of legitimization of communist rule. Lacking any substantial democratic validity, communism was bound to refer to Marxist eschatology as the ultimate justification of the social

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and political order. This kind of justification was very far from any empirical testing and the working class was conceived as a theoretical construct rather than an empirical reality of life in the factories or industrial suburbs. However, the ideologues of the communist state constantly tried to prove the link between political power and the working class. The rituals of election of the highest Party nomenklatura by Party cells in the biggest factories were developed to show this intimate relation. The genuine idea of the Polish opposition was to attack Party ideology on its own territory by organizing workers against the communist state. However, acting in this way the opposition had to adopt, at least partly, the ideology of the special historical role of the working class, this time conceived as the destroyer of the communist state. Why did the working class have to dismantle the communist state? The answer was very simple: because it did not fulfill the promise of making life better and easier for the poorest part of society. Therefore, the ideology of the opposition became that of protecting the working class against the abuses of the state which in theory was supposed to be their state. Historically, the name “Workers’ Defense Committee” was invented as a response to the official reaction to workers’ riots in 1976 but the name perfectly reflected the main goal of the opposition movement. The idea that opposition to the communist regime could be built up in the name of the working class became an official slogan of Solidarity. It contained, however, an ambiguity which reflected the ambiguity of the workers’ relation to the communist state. I have discussed this problem earlier in pointing out that for the majority of people the rejection of communism meant building a system which would preserve the elements of the welfare state, and at the same time introduce a market economy. People believed that they could in such an ideal system realize initiatives which were blocked by official policies under communism. They also believed that they could still remain under the protection of the state. This situation provoked a constant tension within the Solidarity movement which can be described in Hegelian categories of form and content,as I havce already discussed in the previous chapter: a form which was liberal democratic, as Jowett has pointed out39, but a content (of demands, for example) that remained within the communist tradition.

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Radical Change or Liberal Utopia In the “first” Solidarity (1980–1981), however, there emerged certain elements of a different kind of thinking. Groups of intellectuals proposed radical changes in the economy and wanted to introduce a genuine free-market economy. Economically they were inspired by Frederick Hayek and the Chicago School and politically by the success of liberal reforms in the U.S. and the U.K. As Jerzy Szacki has written, they had to face the task of total reconstruction of society, and this idea was in principle foreign to classical liberal thought, which was directed to the justification and rationalization of an existing political practice.41 Although political and economic liberalism became important for Polish politics after 1989 with Leszek Balcerowicz’s reforms and the “liberal” government of Jan Bielecki, it had originated in certain ideas of the democratic opposition in the late seventies and enjoyed increasing popularity in the eighties.42 However, it was marginal both as an economic task as well as a political option. On the one side, liberalism was opposed by the mainstream opposition’s concept of civil society; on another by the Catholic Church’s social teaching. The growing role of liberal ideology resulted from gradual loss of faith in the possibility of demolishing the communist system. Liberalism seemed to offer an alternative kind of reform directed rather at forming new forms of ownership and economic relationships than at the struggle for power. One of the major proponents of liberalism, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, stated in 1989, “It is entirely unimportant to us who introduces liberal principles, Mr Walesa or Mr Rakowski. What matters is that they be introduced.”43 The liberals believed that their option could be accepted by the Party nomenklatura because it would give them economic instead of political power. Party activists would turn into managers and eventually into owners of privatized property. Adherents of liberalism assumed that the “China model” of society, with economic reforms and the unimpaired political power of the Communist Party would evolve in the direction of liberal democracy. I think that this hope depended to a great extent on acceptance of the dogma of the close link between a free market economy and political democracy. Creating capitalist relationships in the economy would surely result in the long run in the creation of representative democracy. The first Polish free election was held on the same day that police and army forces brutally suppressed the Tienanmen demonstrations in China. The Polish Round Table agreement had established the possibility of

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peacefully changing the power apparatus, whereas events in China were a blow to illusions about a gradual evolution from economic reform to a democratic society. Polish liberals had to reject the strategy of “small steps” and start building a capitalist economy “from above.” They started to create the “ideal social system” of an unrestricted free market economy and the political institutions of a representative democracy.

The Last Polish Uprising Like the history of many other Eastern European nations, Polish history has been marked by the struggle to preserve national identity. The partition of the state at the end of the eighteenth century made the problem of national survival the highest priority for generations to come. Romantic poetry created symbols, metaphors, and tropes ready to describe the fate of the nation. They became a means of communication within and between generations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.44 From this perspective communism was perceived as a form of Russian domination, and the Soviet regime as a continuation of traditional Russian politics of subordinating Poland. By the same token the West was seen in an ambiguous way. On the one hand, it was a source of resistance to Russia and was associated with the idea of Poland as a Western, European nation; on the other it was accused of corruption, of having lost the “real” Western values which were protected in enslaved Poland. The Yalta agreement of 1945 confirmed this image of the West and served as an argument for treating it with the greatest suspicion. Unarguably, Romantic symbols played an important role in mobilizing the collective imagination during the strikes of 1980 and afterwards. Some analyses of the Solidarity movement emphasize Pope John Paul II’s first trip to Poland in 1979. This visit revealed the strength not only of masses gathered in the name of the nation and the Church but also of traditional ideology and its potential for creating a collective consciousness. This “power of symbols” turned out to be crucial in defeating the communist ideology.45 Public masses, collective prayers, the singing of Church hymns and the national anthem became regular features of every demonstration in 1980–1891 and after Martial Law. This element caused a lot of confusion among representatives of the Western Left, who came to see this real worker’s protest. They had to confront religious and national emotions instead of traditional leftist slogans. The role of religious symbols became even more important in the eighties. Catholicism, in fact, fulfilled the function of “civil religion”

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and its symbols and ethical teachings were generally accepted even by people who held opposed metaphysical beliefs. The generalization of this mood was the principle that recovering national identity and dignity was the main task of Solidarity, more important than creating a free market economy or a socially just society. This task was even considered more important than that of building a democratic society. The nation, understood as a set of values closely connected with Catholic Church teaching, was supposed to play a decisive function in organizing society. Instead of searching for compromise in the political sphere, Poles were to uncover hidden and partly forgotten values and base their social cooperation on them. Walesa’s famous remark at the end of strikes in 1980 that “we really come to terms one Pole with another Pole” was meant a simple formulation of this ideology.46 From this standpoint communism was regarded as a meaningless break in Polish history, conceived in terms of creating new values or patterns of life. If there had been any novelty during this period it was considered to have been corrupt and to have served as a vehicle for the enslavement of the nation. If the secular left opposition was ready to recognize a certain emancipatory potential in the communist period and the liberals appreciated, at least partly, communist modernization, the proponents of the national option treated the communist period as a “silent past.”

Beyond Economy and Nationalism: Civil Society and the Ethos of Solidarity “Civil society” became the most important slogan of the underground movement in the eighties after the imposition of Martial Law. The popularity of this idea was due to factors similar to those that brought about the growing interest in economic reforms. The communist elite seemed to control political power and it appeared certain that Solidarity was on the defensive. On the other hand, however, it was clear that the communist regime, by not going to the extreme in oppression, was not able to eliminate Solidarity entirely from the political field. On the side of the communist regime this stalemate meant giving up any attempt to spread its influence beyond controlling the system of political institutions. Solidarity was able to focus on the grassroots activity which was crucial for the survival of the movement. The idea of civil society was by no means the only tactical response to the political circumstances. It had originated in the seventies in the idea of creating workers’ committees, mentioned earlier, and was later

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developed by the first Solidarity into the concept of self-limiting revolution. In both cases besides the contextual significance linked to the inability of the opposition to struggle for political power, this turning away from politics was a conscious, ethically-motivated choice. The idea of solidarity itself served as a basis for this vision of society. Particular conflicts in society and the concept of conflict itself were perceived as having been imposed from the outside by powers which were foreign to Polish society. The first steps in recovering the originary social unity depended upon resisting the temptation to play a regular political game. The ideological background of this idea can be located in two main sources: Christian anthropology and the ethical tradition of Polish socialism. The first was expressed mainly by the intellectual group centered around a Catholic independent weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, which I have described in Chapter One. Father Jozef Tischner, the man who exerted perhaps the greatest influence on the spiritual endowment of Solidarity, was a member of this group. In his sermon “Community” (Wspolnota) he laid emphasis on the ethical dimension of the movement. Solidarity is possible only among people who have a conscience, and having a conscience is a state which must result from conscious decision. A good politics is in itself a matter of conscience: a bad politics demands intervention which protects a space where solidarity can be achieved.47 This tendency was in accordance with the viewpoint of the secular left opposition. People of this orientation, such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron, began their political activism far from the Catholic Church’s teaching. In the seventies they called themselves successors to the tradition of the anti-communist Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and to that of liberal rationalism. Both orientations were popular among radical intellectuals before the Second World War and were directed originally against the Catholic Church, which at that time incarnated conservative power in society. The convergence of standpoints became possible because of the endorsement by the Church of the role of human labour as a central factor in creating the self and human rights as a guarantee of political freedom, which in turn could be understood as a worldly expression of free will. Former critics of the Church discovered in the late seventies that it had protected the dignity of labour and the freedom of the individual against the totalitarian state.48 Therefore they had to change their impression of the Church from that of the conservative power to one of participant in the same struggle for liberation from totalitarianism.

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The idea of civil society which sprang from these sources had a mainly ethical character. Civil society was to be an organization of people against the state and beyond the state. The state was considered irredeemably corrupt and the only chance for spiritual restoration therefore lay outside the system. So, at the foundation of the idea of civil society lay an ethical, rather than social, challenge. For this reason the idea of civil society as accepted in the eighties was to a high degree deliberately utopian. It was to serve as a criterion of the society’s recovery from contamination by the totalitarian state. The network of independent associations, societies and organizations was supposed to be an expression of such a change. Because it was not possible to build such a network in the presence of a regime which claimed a monopoly of power it had to be imagined as an ideal social system.49 Real problems appeared when the dissidents came to power and confronted the task of changing an ethical utopia into a real system of institutions.

Consequences and Contradictions Finally, I wish to present a few observations which could shed light on relationships between the “myth of origin” and current politics in Poland. First, it is clear that none of the versions of the ultimate purpose of revolution have been fulfilled. Such is the usual fate of revolutionary promises. Mythological as they are, they are bound to lie in the sphere of utopian thinking. On the other hand as a very strong motivational factor in human behavior they have to be perceived as being attainable in a finite time period. In Poland, for instance, as I have pointed earlier, the standard explanation of the political success of the post-communist party involves ascribing to it the mechanism of “escape from freedom.” During the transformation people achieved freedom but lost the security which the totalitarian state had provided. Therefore, they attempted to reconstruct the former situation and thus voted for the post-communist party. This explanation was often used by disappointed dissidents like Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik or Jozef Tischner. Reference to the relics of communism enables them to account for the failure of radical ethical change by positing the anthropological mechanism of mental enslavement. Second, a mood of disappointment results in the radicalization of the political stage. This development is also connected with the failure of a myth. In this case, however, the political elite is accused of not having been radical enough, of having compromised with its opponents, thereby

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legitimizing them. From this point of view the most important myth (or counter-myth) of origin is associated with the Round Table agreement. At the Round Table the opposition and the ruling elite came to an understanding and opened up a road to political reforms. In the eyes of the radicals this agreement became the Original Sin of the new Poland, blocking the possibility of a real break with the past. Moreover, in the myth of the Round Table talks there is hidden the corresponding myth of Magdalenka. This refers to a villa, occupied by the Ministry of the Interior, where a narrow group of the representatives of the opposition, the Catholic Church, and the Communist Party met, and where the agreement was forged. For the participants in the Magdalenka talks it was just a technical arrangement, whereas for their opponents it was a betrayal. Therefore, acceptance of the myth means rejecting the Round Table agreement. Third, various myths of origin can undergo differentiation and fragmentation. It is possible for opposing parties to invoke the same myth and for parties with similar programs to draw upon different myths. For instance, radical right-wing populists as well as postcommunists demand that respecting the original postulates of the workers’ protest should be met. They stress the fact that they were forgotten after the transformation. However, in each case fragments of the same myth are included in a different whole. For the postcommunists, the postulates were abandoned in the attempts to built a free-market economy at any cost. For the right-wing populists, the workers’ protest was closely connected with the national revival and they accuse liberals of being agents of international capital and its attempt to dominate Poland. Fourth, divisions according to different myths of origin have dominated the Polish political stage. Successive elections have focused on the struggle for identity, for a definition of Polish society, rather than on discussions of economic and social problems. In this fight the mythological origins of post-totalitarian Poland have proven decisive.

Expectations, Mythology, and Empty Signifiers In the earlier section of this book I have tried to show the expectations people had about the possible systems which could have replaced communist totalitarism. At this point, I would like, in light of the Polish example, to discuss the relationship between expectations, mythology and empty signifiers. As I have considered the two first categories above I will to start from Ernesto Laclau’s concept of empty signifier and the

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significance of this concept for politics. From a theoretical point of view, “[A]n empty signifier can … only emerge if there is a structural impossibility in signification as such, and only if this impossibility can signify itself as an interruption (subversion, distortion, et cetera) of the structure of the sign”.50 Therefore, an empty signifier, which is a result of a rupture in the system, is at the same time a condition of the systematicity of the system. It marks the limits of the system and constitutes a principle of exclusion that organizes the system. This means that an empty signifier is “a signifier of the pure cancellation of all difference”.51 An empty signifier is, thus, a radicalization of the logic of equivalence, and as such it represents “the pure being of the system – or rather, the system as pure Being”.52 As is stated by a commentator on Laclau’s thought, “[the] empty signifier is neither a signifier attached to different signifieds (an equivocal signifier) nor a signifier simultaneously attached to different signified which overdetermine and underdetermine its meaning (a floating signifier). Rather, an empty signifier is a signifier which is not attached to any signified due to the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier.”53 From a political point of view, what is the most interesting is the relationship of an empty signifier to particular signified. The need for the universal positivity combined with the impossibility of total signification results in the elevation of a particular signified to the status of universality. In political reality this process, as Laclau writes, goes through the following stages: The concrete aim of the struggle is not only that aim in its concreteness; it also signifies opposition to the system. The first signified establishes the differential character of that demand or mobilization vis-à-vis all other demands or mobilizations. The second signified establishes the equivalence of all these demands in their common opposition to the system. As we can see, any concrete struggle is dominated by this contradictory movement that simultaneously asserts and abolishes its own singularity.54

Laclau’s favorite example is a situation of total disorder in society when there is no clear social structure. In such a case people initiate a political action directed at the establishing of any kind of order. The very idea of order becomes an empty signifier on which the aims of all political groups concentrate. Of course, when a particular group is able to substitute its own idea of order for an empty signifier, then the idea of order loses its allure. The universality of an empty signifier must be established again. Laclau describes this situation as “constitutively split between the concrete politics that they advocate and the ability of those politics to fill the empty place.”55

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In a paper I have written with Dorota Kolodziejczyk, we applied Laclau’s categories to the idea of the Polish nation in recent Polish politics56. Putting stress on the importance of the idea of the nation as an empty signifier for the last two hundred years of Polish politics we came to the conclusion that the role of this idea was decreasing in posttotalitarian Poland. However, the problem of national ideology still exists even in independent, democratic Poland. It is not so much a problem of nationalism, because nationalist parties have not received significant support in elections. It is rather a problem of the idea of the nation as a general point of reference in shaping the political field. The influence of this idea is so prevalent that all political groups seem to use it as a vehicle for generating support. I have observed above that Polish politics is still more a politics of identity than a politics oriented around social problems. To some extent this character is justified by the difficult task of constructing new democratic habits in society. The problems which appear along the way can often provoke attempts to seek again the lost unity of the nation. The majority of Poles still remember how attractive this mood was in the tragic periods of recent decades. However, the extension of national ideology can be dangerous for the still immature Polish democracy. There are powerful groups which are potentially very susceptible to such an ideology. Losers in the economic transformation can easily turn to populist, xenophobic views, for instance coming to see the openness of Poland to Europe as a source of their troubles. In order to counter this threat one must reconstruct and widen the public sphere as a place for negotiation and compromise. 56 This moment of transition is a good starting point for discussing the relationship between the empty signifier, mythology and expectations. The nation (and solidarity) plays the role of an empty signifier insofar as it seems to make it possible to achieve the lost fullness of community. Radical oppression and the frustration of national needs meant that the nation came to seem the only possible dimension of social identity. The very idea of the nation attracts all political efforts and endows the community with a sense of identity. As Laclau says, in a situation of repression the communitarian fullness is restored by the pure negativity of an empty signifier. This negativity, if contrasted with the social reality, can be transformed into struggle for liberation. This transformation, in turn, demands the translation of negativity into the language of the positive purpose of the struggle. The most obvious such translation is to turn negativity into positivity by giving an empty signifier the status of positivity. As I have above indicated, at some point particular demands have to be revealed and then the constitutive split

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emerges. At this moment the politics of the empty signifier turns into what I would call mythology. My use of “mythology” is slightly different from Laclau’s use of the concept of myth. He defines myth as “a principle of reading of a given situation.”57 As such, myth is of hegemonic character; its function is to metaphorize an absent fullness. Jacob Torfing, commenting on this concept, writes: myth will tend to provide a surface on which unsatisfied demands are inscribed. If the surface of inscription is hegemonized by what is inscribed on it, then the moment of inscription will be eliminated in favor of the literality of what is inscribed. However, if the expression of the very form of fullness continues to dominate, it becomes the unlimited horizon of any social demand. Myth is thereby transformed into a social imaginary.58

So for Laclau the myth form reading of a particular situation can be transformed into a horizon of social demands which he calls a “social imaginary.” For me, mythology intervenes in the political precisely at the moment when an empty signifier turns into its concrete embodiment and the competing groups start to present particular claims. In other words, if Solidarity in 1980 represented an expression of a chain of equivalents directed against the oppressive regime, in 1990 the same signifier served as a vehicle conveying different political programs in society. However, because those programs were built up in a social void, in a society without clear social divisions and expressions of group interests, they had to have mythological character. Using Laclau’s terminology, mythology is more an expression of “floating signifier” where the same signifier can be attached to different signifieds in various contexts. In the conditions of transformation those programs which signify Solidarity are more predictions about the future than actual programs rooted in mass consciousness. Therefore, they are the basis for what I have called “expectations,” as cognitive and emotional structures directed to the future. The more appealing are particular expectations, the more they can fix the meaning of the process of transformation and thereby become shaping factors in social reality.

Chapter 3

Perspectives on Time: From Philosophy to Anthropology In the previous chapters I have elaborated the concept of political time and social time, taking examples from the situation in Poland after the transformation of 1989. In this chapter I shall refer to various traditions in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology in order to show the fundamentals of the idea of time as a social construction.

The Problem of Time in Pragmatism and Phenomenology If we take physical time as a point of departure then we have to confront the alleged “objectivity” of physical time as opposed to the “subjectivity” of social time. However, time, if it is not the special subject of a natural scientist’s investigation, presents itself to people as a kind of construction. Almost all the things we do with time have such a character. Cutting up time, the division of time, and creating time differences are constructions imposed on the objective flow of physical time. For this and similar cases we need a special set of institutions invested with authority to choose and set up events and the forms of their observances. Philosophical reflection on time is concerned mainly with the problem of time as experience as well as construction. The idea that time is imposed by the human mind on physical reality originated, as is well known, in Kant’s philosophy. For him, time is one of the a priori forms that organize human experience. Time is a construction but, of course, it is not a social construction. The objectivity of time is guaranteed by its a priori and formal character. Time is thus a precondition of any event appearing in the human world of experience. However, time, like space, is a feature of the knowing subject and not a feature of things. Time is a part of inner sense, which enables an individual to perceive the change in his or her experience. I think that such a description of time opened up the way for a philosophical

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justification of the thesis that time is a part of subjective experience, and that it can be conceived as a construction. I do not intend here to present a full account of the development of the concept of time in modern and contemporary philosophy. Nevertheless, I would like to point to some ideas connected with considering time as an experience, because they may help us to handle the notion of time as a construction. I want to concentrate on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and William James’ psychology because they treat time as a part of the living experience of human individual. Therefore, their approach could supplement the concept of time as a social construction. James, in Chapter XV of his Principles of Psychology, discusses the problem of the perception of time. For him, as for many others who deal with the same problem, the real issue is how to grasp the difference between the past, the future and the present. What decides that we should recognize some things as located in the past rather than in the present or the future? James places the problem of time within his broader idea of the stream of thought, and his inititial hypothesis is: “The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing.”1 The present is thus a locus of the intuition of time, and James defines this present as a special kind of present, “specious present.” This psychological present can be extended to past and future in the sense of a changing situation of processes rather than events. Referring to the past James writes: “But whether our feeling of the time which immediately-past events have filled be of something long or of something short, it is not what it is because those events are past, but because they have left behind them processes which are present. To those processes, however caused, the mind would still respond by feeling a specious present, with one part of it just vanishing or vanished into the past.”2 In fact passing of time is equated by James with the change of perception in the stream of consciousness. As such, the experience of time is of the same nature as other perceptions, for instance that of space. The difference is that the immediate experience of time is much narrower than that of space. James estimates that it can last from six to twelve seconds. This small interval marks the boundaries of our present, the moment which we live in. It is called, as I have mentioned above the specious present. The past and the future are constituted by the “vaguely vanishing backward and forward” of the specious present. What is clear from James’ theory is that Kant’s notion of time is entirely mistaken. Time is a perception, so there is no such thing as empty time, a sheer intuition of time. “Awareness of change is thus the condition on which our perception of time’s flow depends; but

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there exists no reason to suppose that empty time’s own changes are sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused. The change must be of some concrete sort – an outward or inward sensible series, or a process of attention or volition.”3 Time perception, however, concerns only a very short period backward. The remembrance of remote past events is an issue of memory. According to James the main difference between the immediate experience of time and memory consists in the fact that: [R]emoter dates are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically by names … if we wish to think of a particular past epoch, we must think of a name or other symbol, or else of certain concrete events, associated therewith … to “refer” any special fact to the past epoch is to think with the names and events which characterize its date, to think, in short, with a lot of contiguous associates. 4

Besides this “intellectual” side of memory, James stresses also its emotional content. For past events to become a part of my memory it is necessary for them to have “warmth and intimacy.” At this point James refers to his chapter on the self as containing the idea of the “appropriating” of all experiences by the thinker as his own. Memory images thus are very complicated representations, brought about by complex processes of associations. “What memory goes with is … a very complex representation, that of the fact to be recalled plus its associates, the whole forming one ‘object’ … known in one integral pulse of consciousness … and demanding probably a vastly more intricate brainprocess than that on which any simple sensorial image depends.”5 Like James, Merleau-Ponty also links time to the self, and he again does so in opposition to Kant’s notion of the pure self as a basis for synthesis. He states that we should start our investigation of time from time itself, not from a preestablished idea of subjectivity. Time, according to Merleau-Ponty, arises from our relation to things. So time is not a series of successions to record or a feature of things themselves. The time which belongs to things is just a repeating of “instances of ‘now’” and as such it does not present any real temporality. “The definition of time which is implicit in the comparison undertaken by common sense, and which might be formulated as ‘succession of now’ has not even the disadvantage of treating past and future as present: it is inconsistent, since it destroys the very notion of ‘now’, and that of succession.”6 The same mistake is made by psychologists who treat the past just as passing “now” and the future as a projection of “now”. Merleau-Ponty seems to locate the centre of the constitution of time in the present:

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It is said that we guess “by analogy” that this inimitable present will, like all the others, pass away. But for there to be an analogy between presents that have elapsed and the actual present, the latter must be given not only as present, it must already announce itself as what will soon be past, we must feel the pressure upon it of a future intent on dispossessing it; in short the course of time must be primarily not only the passing of present to past, but also that of the future to the present.7

Time, however, is not an object of consciousness; it is a dimension of our being. As such it cannot be approached only from an intellectual point of view, it is consistent with “lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come.”8 For this reason, Merleau-Ponty assigns the flow of time to “the mutual harmonizing and overlapping of past and future through the present.”9 The present is “the zone in which being and consciousness coincide.”10 Because an individual is always immersed in its present, which is unique and different from anyone else’s present, time seems for Merleau-Ponty to have a subjective character. It is a feature of existence, not an objective sequence of the states of affairs.11 The most important philosophical implication arising from this reflection is that “it discloses subject and object as two abstract ‘moments’ of a unique structure which is presence. It is through time that being is conceived, because it is through the relations of time-subject and timeobject that we are able to understand those obtaining between subject and world.”12 Merleau-Ponty’s work on time has far-reaching consequences for many subjects in philosophy. For the present purpose, however, the most interesting implication is the close link established between the subject and its time. The experience of time becomes from this perspective a “moment” in the process of subjectivization and is subsumed under the complicated relation between subject and world. The idea that time is a dimension of existence, which was masked in James by his quasinaturalistic terminology, is revealed openly in Merleau-Ponty. This idea entails that the experience of time does not have an immediate character but it is a complicated process of harmonizing the different stages of action and intentionalites that establish the fundamentals of human acts. By this view Kant was not right in his concept of a universal synthesis which presupposes the experience of time. Time is unique in the same way as an individual’s existence and its universality can be approached only from the perspective of formal categories defining being-in-world. For my purpose the most interesting account of time construction in contemporary philosophy is given by George Herbert Mead. His approach in fact unifies the two different perspectives on time: that of experience and that of construction. What I find most significant in his

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work is the close link established between experience, action and construction. Action is for Mead the primary matter of human reality: the world is set up through testing the consequences of the acts undertaken to resolve the difficulties involved in a situation. The psychical appears as a result of the inhibition of action. When action goes smoothly there is no need for the psychical to emerge. Such a need appears if the difficulties an agent encounters are so distressing that action is inhibited. Action for Mead has the following scheme: gestures – significant symbols – meanings. In this scheme particular elements are built on one another in the sense that simpler elements become aspects of more complex forms. However, it is not clear if these internal links are only of a genetic character or if each act of communication is a synthesis of biological and cultural elements. In solving this problem it may be useful to analyze Mead’s theory of action with regard to the fact that both gestures and significant symbols are certain forms of actions, namely communicative actions. The act can be described in purely biological categories in four stages: impulse, perception, manipulation and consummation. In becoming social the act changes in two respects: first, its internal structure undergoes a change, and the stage of manipulation comes to dominate, which is related to using implements and also to coordinating eye and hand for the construction of the world. Second, individual acts become elements of social acts, in which the need to relate the whole act to an individual disappears. The act is attributed to a social group in a two-fold sense: patterns of acts are social, and they become objectified in the habits of a group. Social acts distributed among individuals are integrated by virtue of social objects, which are the same for all individuals involved, and by virtue of the mechanisms of communication, which permit an ordering of social acts. Thus transferred to the social level, the biological act becomes the basis for the construction of reality. In this whole system biological mechanisms have meanings as general patterns of acts which undergo far-reaching modifications, and whose elements can built up of entirely different structures. Of biological character also are impulses which are a basis for motivation. If we are to relate these interdependencies to the problem of sign creation then we may also say that the patterns of reacting to objects would also be of biological character. These patterns undergo remarkable changes at the moment when they become elements of social process. Objects one reacts to are created in the process of social interaction. Mead calls the world in which the act is going on “the world

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that is there.” It is the world composed of objects that achieve validity because they can become a basis for a successful act.13 It is tempting to interpret Mead’s concept of “ the world that is there” as a certain version of phenomenology. There are striking similarities between Husserl’s central category of “Lebenswelt” and Mead’s concept. In both cases we are dealing with a world that precedes all scientific reflection, although in itself it is not a subject of this reflection. However, in Mead this world is of a special character; it consists in part of those elements of scientific theories that have become elements of things. Therefore, the world can evolve and assume newer and newer forms in the course of scientific progress. It is also a world of action and not of consciousness. The aforementioned differences between Husserl’s and Mead’s concepts shed light on the role of nature in the philosophy of the latter. Relevance to nature is limited only to action as a biological fact. It is only in this sense that we can talk of Mead’s naturalism. Gestures in themselves, not being a true language, provide a pattern for communication which in a modified form can be detected in significant symbols and meanings.14 In this frame Mead puts his concept of time. As a basic unit of action, the act is a model for structure and functioning of the world. Action is not only a model of the structure of reality, but depending on the level on which it takes place, serves specific functions as a basic structure of every process. Mind and self appear as an effect of the overlapping of characteristics of a social process and the general characteristics of action itself, prior to society. From the mutual connections of individuals’ actions Mead gradually derives basic psychological categories, such as mind, thinking and consciousness. Mead claims that for the description of the human mind a single language is sufficient – the language of action;15 however, if we analyze his concepts in detail it becomes clear that the structure and functions of action, at least at the social level, are subjected to cultural factors. In his book The Philosophy of the Present Mead’s starting point is the concept of the emergent evolution. The emergent event cannot be reduced to the preexisting conditions, it always transcends the given situation. Therefore, the past cannot ever dominate the present. On the contrary according to Mead: [I]t is that there is and always will be a necessary relation of the past and the present but that the present in which an emergent appears accepts that which is novel as an essential part of the universe, and from that standpoint rewrites its past. The emergent then ceases to be an emergent and follows from the past which has replaced the former past. 16

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The novelty, when it has happened, becomes a referent for the reconstruction of the past. The past is thus a continuous creation dependent on the present, and the present, in turn, constantly creates its own past. Mead’s concept of time can be a subject of different diverging interpretations. Mead himself was under the influence of Whitehead’s approach to the theory of relativity and he attempted to establish a link between this theory and his previous ideas in social psychology. This link is possible owing to the concept of “sociality” which is defined as follows, “The social character of the universe we find in the situation in which the novel event is in both the old order and the new which its advent heralds. Sociality is the capacity of being several things at once.” 17 For social situations the human self is an example of sociality. Taking the role of the other permits an individual to refer in his action to different social systems at the same time. The concept of sociality can, however, describe the behavior of inanimate objects: “in the passage from the past into the future the present object is both the old and the new, and this holds for its relations to all other members of the system to which it belongs.”18 Therefore, the concept of sociality can encompass the action of an individual as well as the development of the natural world. Nevertheless, it is sociality that determines the time order and is presupposed in establishing the new past. It is worth mentioning that the main point in Mead’s reasoning is that sociality can never be reduced to preexisting conditions. It is always of emergent character and so it is the present. Thus, in fact we have in Mead the two distinct but overlapping principles: that of sociality and that of emergence. They are inseparable in so far as novelty defines sociality which in turn becomes a point of reference for the new emergent. The implication of the relationship between sociality and novelty is the harmonization of the natural and the social world. This harmony is possible because of the twofold nature of the human being: [I]t is because an animal is both alive and a part of a physico-chemical world that life is an emergent and extends its influence to the environment about it. It is because the conscious individual is both an animal and it is also able to look before and after that consciousness emerges with the meanings and values with which it informs the world.19

Human consciousness endows the world with meanings and values which are located in the present. They arise from the interactions between individuals as well as from the cumulation of knowledge understood as a social phenomenon. The past and the future “give us only the schedule of the means, and the plans of campaign, for their realization.”20 Mead summarize the complicated relationships between sociality, consciousness, moral values and the time order in the following way:

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We live always in a present whose past and whose future are the extension of the field within which its undertaking may be carried out. This present is the scene of the emergence which gives always new heavens and a new earth, and its sociality is the very structure of our minds. Since society has endowed us with self-consciousness, we can enter personally into the largest undertakings which the intercourse of rational selves extends before us. And because we can live with ourselves as well as with others, we can criticize ourselves, and make our own the values in which we are involved through those undertakings in which the community of all rational beings is engaged.21

For Mead, as for Merleau-Ponty, the privileged place in time construction is occupied be the present. For both thinkers this focus on the present is justified by their preoccupation with human existence which, they think, is of momentary character. They both also share the idea that time is organized according to the deep features of human existence. These similarities have been interestingly elaborated by Sandra Rosenthal and Patrick L. Bourgeois in their book Mead and Merleau-Ponty. Toward a Common Vision. Discussing the time dimension in both philosophers, they emphasize that their similarities stem from the approach to time as the expression of the lived experience of temporality. “This lived experience of temporality reveals the depth and movement of temporal passage, as well as the privileged role of the present from which the subject opens onto past and future.”22 The differences between Mead and Merleau-Ponty consist in their different backgrounds: pragmatism and phenomenology, respectively. I think, however, that the most important issue one can find in Mead and which seems to be absent in the French phenomenologist is that of the social reference of time construction. Mead, as I have pointed out above, repeats several times that the present is of a social nature and it can be understood only in this context. This approach is of great importance for discussing the social character of time becuse it can bridge at the philosophical level two different trends in researching this phenomenon. One of them I have illustrated using James’s and Merlau-Ponty’s ideas, but it can be found in other thinkers (mainly, but not exclusively, those of existential and phenomenological orientation). Generally speaking it is the consideration of time as an expression of the individual and existential dimension of man. The main problem arising in this trend is to specify and locate the experience of time. There are, of course, various points of view on this issue which distinguish, for example, Merlau-Ponty from Sartre and Husserl from Heidegger. But what they have in common is a perception of time as a result of deeper structures of human experience. What is especially interesting for me is the idea that this experience includes (or even is preceded by) an action. This idea, as is well known, was disseminated by Martin Heidegger with his concept of Dasein as the basic category of human existence.

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His concept of human existence also sheds light on the anchoring of the time construction in the present. As I have indicated, this idea was widely accepted but Heidegger’s formulation of Dasein helped to change the perspective. Dasein in its project (Entwurf) opens up essential potentialities and, in this sense, its present being determines the future. If Dasein in its essential expressions is tied to the present and its openness to the future is somehow determined by the present, then we reach a circle: the present, the future and the past. The present defines the mode in which the future is present to Dasein, this determines the shape of the past and, in turn, the past creates the present. In this sense, the relationship between the past and the future is of an individual, heroic character. Reconstruction of the past is, first of all, a question of searching for the authentic dimension of existence. In discovering the past an historian, a writer or a mythologist discovers himself or herself. The past is his or her own past which creates his or her own future, and reveals the deep layers of existence of the individual being. This pattern is very clear in Sartre’s concept of openness to the future and of action being determined by future goals. In such an approach the locus of time construction is determined by the reference to the future. The present is significant only so far as it is instrumental to the future and the past is entirely flexible. The still non-existent future is the modus operandi, the axis of the time strategy. This of course is done for the sake of human freedom. If an individual is to be free from any constrains, it has to direct its action to goals which are not defined by preexisting conditions. Such goals can be located only in the future.

Time, Dialogue, and Society The second trend I would like to analyse brings to the fore the social character of time construction. Here we are dealing mainly with the problem of the relationship between memory (especially collective memory), “objective” history, and social life. I will discuss these questions later; at this point I would like to concentrate on the possibility of handling social time from the philosophical perspective, which would be an extension of the issue of the experience of time. The reconstruction of the past as an individual task has to, at this point, meet at a certain level the requirements of social approval. This social setting of the reconstruction of the past has two different dimensions. First, the existential situation of Dasein depends on the exchange with the other. Here we have to face the problem of the discrepancy between two

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traditions: that of Heidegger, which presupposes a rather individualistic vision of human existence, and that of dialogism, which assumes the other to be an indispensable part of an individual. From the Heideggerian point of view, an individual’s endowment is created in the encounter with time’s dimension of existence. The dialogical tradition of Levinas, Buber, Bakhtin and Mead puts stress on the encounter with the other as an essential part of the existence of the individual. If we adopt the dialogical perspective, then the most important factor in the existential situation, which presupposes the reconstruction of the past, is the relationship with the other. This relationship in itself is of timeless character because it is a metaphysical basis for the constitution of the individual, or it is an assumption (as in Peirce’s “community of investigators” or Mead’s “universum of discourse”) of any historical and cultural utterance. The dialogical perspective seems to adopt the timeless universum which presupposes the reconstruction of the past as well as of the present and the future. This annihilation of time makes dialogue the main vehicle of the construction of reality. The dialogical reality transcends the difference between the past, the future and the present and makes insignificant any relation of subordination among them. Second, the social aspect of the construction of the past is also one of common approval of an individual’s attitude. An individual’s subjective feeling and the modes of grasping time meet at this point the readiness of society to adopt them as its own way of perceiving the relationship between the past and the future. The most extreme case of this confrontation is that of religious prophets and charismatic leaders who can convince their followers that they live in another time. This special time is usually the future or “the time beyond time” and it marks the difference between an ordinary existence and that of a special kind which is held to be available only to a chosen few. However, the attempt to impose a special vision of time is common to historians, writers, and politicians. From this point of view, time is an important part of the exercise of symbolic power in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense in which “[S]ymbolic power is a power of constructing reality, and one which tends to establish a gnoseological order: the immediate meaning of the world (and in particular of the social world) depends on what Durkheim calls logical conformism, that is, ‘a homogenous conception of time, space, number and cause, one which makes it possible for different intellects to reach agreement’.”23 In the quotation Durkheim refers to time as a physical phenomenon showing its social dependence. I think, however, that this observation refers also to time understood in a more social sense as a relationship between past, present and future.

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At this point we approach the problem of the relationship between time construction and the experience of time as a philosophical phenomenon and the social construction of time as the use and abuse of history, to quote the title of Nietzsche’s famous essay. This terrain is occupied mainly by historians and the discussion of the “objectivity” of history and its status in the social distribution of knowledge. The characteristic feature of contemporary discussions on the nature of historical knowledge is the growing popularity of a standpoint which sees history as a kind of narrative. There are two main consequences of such a perspective. First, the “facts” in order to find their significance have to refer to a context, to some sort of whole or totality. Second, the narrative of the past has to be always self-referential.24 This selfreference means that the narratives are always dependent on the broader views of the particular historian or the community of historians. For this reason, history is always linked to the present as far as the present is a locus of existence. It was Nietzsche, who, in the essay above named, for the first time recognized the subordination of history to present circumstances. For him the living seek from knowledge of the past an enrichment of the spirit and a lesson. “[W]e need it [history] for life and action, not as a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a selfish life and a cowardly or base action.”25 In this way Nietzsche links doing history with the existence of man, in fact with the deepest level of existence. “History is necessary to the living man in three ways: in relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance.”26 Thus, understanding history is bound to the present as existence is a matter of the present. Nietzsche’s standpoint seems to be most extreme in ascribing to the historian the role of translating the past for present purposes; other thinkers would like, at least, to preserve the role of the historian as an impartial judge of past events. As an example of such a standpoint I would like to refer to Michael Oakshott’s views on the activity of a historian. He states: “What we call ‘past events’ are … the product of understanding (or having understood) present occurrences as evidence for happenings that have already taken place. The past, in whatever manner it appears, is a certain sort of reading of the present.”27 In fact, the subordination of the past to the present would seem to be inevitable as far as the cognitive relation is concerned. For the only possible way of reading the past is to compare it to present events. They provide us with the tools for deciphering the past, which means to recreate the past from the present perspective. Thus Oakeshott’s conclusion that “there is

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not one past because there is not one present: there is a ‘practical’ past, a ‘scientific’ past and a (specious) ‘contemplative’ past, each a universe of discourse logically different from either of the others”, seems to be irrevocable. Nonetheless, he still intends to give the “scientific” past a special status and to elevate the historian to a level of impartiality not attainable by a “practical” man. He concludes: “The activity of being an historian is not of contributing to the elucidation of a single ideal coherence of events which may be called ‘true’ to the exclusion of all others; it is an activity in which a writer, concerned with the past for its own sake and working to a chosen scale, elicits a coherence in a group of contingencies of similar magnitude.”28 History thus becomes a narrative but one of a special kind, one which preserves a certain amount of objectivity, impartiality and academic honesty. A historian should avoid any political and also “philosophical” involvement; the first simply turns him into a servant of a particular political orientation, while the second makes him merely a moralist.

Time and Social Practices I would say that these two perspectives still mark the field in which the struggle for objectivity in history is going on. The historians’ debate, however, has hardly paid attention to at least two crucial issues that are important for the understanding of the social past. I mean here the existential situation of the makers of social time, and the social functioning of time. Discussing the problem of the experience of time in philosophy I have noticed that philosophers dealing with this issue are concerned more with the individual dimension than the social one. G.H. Mead is probably one of the few exceptions to this rule. He attempts to develop the metaphysical idea of time construction as the universalization of his views on individual human action and the self. It is of even greater significance that he stresses the social and dialogical nature of action and self. This makes his perspective different from that of Merlau-Ponty and other philosophers preoccupied with the problem of time. However, the social dimension of time is in Mead’s work limited to the formal concept of “sociality.” He never investigated real cases of the social construction of time, since he was much more interested in setting up his social notion of the present in the specific interpretation of Einstein’s theory of relativity as given by Whitehead. Also, he had to cope with the concept of timeless conversation that prevails in the dialogical approach. Therefore, we have in Mead two

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different ideas of the ultimate generalization of partial human perspectives: that of the “universe of discourse” and that of the “point of view of mankind.” The first option represents the formal dimension of the possibility of the universalization of particular perspectives. The second one is much more of a dialogical nature. The most universal perspective is built up out of the complicated process of interchanging different perspectives involved in an individual’s activity. In relation to time Mead is much more formal than in others parts of his conception. Here, the dialogical timeless position is taken to the extreme in formulating the formal model of time construction based on the concept of formally understood sociality. I think that formalization of dialogism undermines to some extent Mead’s attempt to bridge the gap between the individual’s action and the social construction of time. Almost at same time as Mead was developing his concept of the present as social, the other orientation arose with the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. It is interesting to note that Halbwachs, like Mead, was under the influence of Bergson’s philosophy of time as a subjective phenomenon and he also had to cope with the problem of the relationship between individual time and collective time. Whereas Mead attempted to bridge the gap between these two kinds of time, Halbwachs developed the concept of collective memory. In his work on this subject he differentiated two kinds of memory: One doctrine is satisfied to note that our past comprises two kinds of elements. Certain elements we can evoke whenever we want. By contrast, others cannot simply be summoned and we seem to encounter various obstacles in searching for them in our past. In reality, the first type might be said to belong to a common domain, in the sense that they are familiar or easily accessible to others as well as ourselves … The second type, which cannot be recalled at will, are readily acknowledged to be available only to ourselves because only we could have known about them.29

This causes the paradox that “[T]he remembrances we evoke with most difficulty are our concern alone and constitute our most exclusive possession.”30 The solution of this paradox is quite simple. According to Halbwachs both kinds of remembrances are of a social character. The difference consists in their being associated with the different types of groups. “Groups that associate frequently enable us to be in them simultaneously, whereas others have so little contact that we have neither intention nor occasion to trace their faded paths of communication. Now it is along such routes, along such sheltered pathways, that we retrieve those remembrances that are uniquely our own.”31 The French sociologist thus makes the difference between the individual memory and the social memory merely a matter of the difference in the degree of

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participation in the groups. For him it is a group that gives an individual the power to remember and to reconstruct the past. The individual memories are banned to the domain of dreams, the realm where “the mind is most removed from society.”32 But in normal circumstances “[T]he individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the framework of social memory.”33 As such, recollections have an inevitably distorted character. They serve the purpose of bringing individuals together and they have to be arranged to “erase from its [social] memory all that might separate individuals, or that might distance groups from each other.”34 This, in turn, entails that the present is the locus of the construction of the collective memory. There is some reason for the theory developed by Halbwachs. First, he thinks that it is much easer to change the past than the present.35 Second, the present can represent a larger set of ideas than is involved in the past. “If the ideas of today are capable of being opposed to recollections and prevailing over them to the extent of transforming them, this is because such ideas correspond to a collective experience if not as ancient, at least much larger.”36 So despite the differences with the philosophical, existential approach to the past, he seems to share with this approach the idea of the present prevailing over the past and being its constituent. I think that in both cases we could note a neglect of the future as a real dimension of time construction. The future is neglected and the stress is put on the relation between the past and the present seen as a locus of human activity and experience. Therefore, the domination of the present is caused by the functional character of social memory. The past is important for the identification of the group and as such it is also subordinated to the present. “What the group opposes to its past is not its present; it is rather the past … of other groups with whom it tends to identify itself.”37 In fact, the present is thus almost undistinguishable from the past. The difference between them is much more one of convention than of real opposition. “In reality present-day ideas are also traditions, and both refer at the same time and with the same right to an ancient or recent social life from which they in some way took their point of departure.”38 As a consequence of seeing the present as formative of social memory, Halbwachs comes to the conclusion that “social thought is essentially a memory and that its entire content consists only of recollections or remembrance … [A]mong them, only those recollections subsist that in every period society, working within its present-day frameworks, can reconstruct.”39 In identifying social thought with a memory, Holbwachs carefully divides collective memory from historical past. History explores its subject from a position that is external to any group. Thus the main

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difference between history and memory is that while history is interested in finding the points of demarcation between particular historical epochs, collective memory is preoccupied with continuity. History thus “gives the impression that everything – the interplay of interests, general orientations, modes of studying men and events, traditions and perspectives on the future – is transformed from one period to another.”40 As a consequence history presents a unitary version of events whereas collective memory brings about many traditions because many groups are involved in their construction. One might suppose that history is written sub speciae aeternitatis and gives an impartial record of events. So history is to some extent elevated above collective memory, but at same time it turns out to be almost useless for it. It is useless because ex definicione it cannot be included in group selfidentity. History is always external to the particular group. This also applies to the concept of time which is accepted in historical research. It is a chronology of events taken from different milieux and juxtaposed in one unified narrative. Such a time is not the time that is present in the consciousness of people. They do not live either in the time of mathematics or of physics. The time which is important for everyday activity, the time in which people live, is always of a social character. It is linked to the memory of the particular group. On the other hand, Halbwachs also rejects Bergson’s and James’s notions of time as a subjective phenomenon that emerges out of an individual’s specific arrangement of consciousness. For Halbwachs “[C]onsciousness is the point of intersection. The apparent continuity of what is called our inner life is due partly to going along such a current, a course of thought unfolding, in others as well as ourself, a particular inclination of collective thought.”41 What James and Bergson describe as the experience of time is merely a current of impressions which “is rigidly linked to the body, never causes us to go outside ourself, and provides no perspective on the past.”42 Time always depends on collective memory; in fact it is a manifestation of memory in the activity of people. For this reason, time cannot be either the property of an individual, a feature of its subjectivization, or an empty objectivization, a one-for-all phenomenon discovered by a universal history or mathematics. As a social phenomenon time can vary from one group to another. Some societies are slow in their lives, some are more rapid. The flow of time, however, is absolute for these societies. It can be compared only from the outside, by juxtaposing the lives of two different societies. Halbwachs emphasizes that while the flow of time is fixed in society, the speed of remembering can differ significantly within the society and even between the members of a group.

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Halbwachs’s approach seems to underline two important point: first, the social character of the construction of time; and second, the identification of memory with time. It seems that for the French sociologist there exists only the present, where human activity is going on, and the past, which is shaped and used by this activity. So the real time, the time of intellectual activity, is identified with memory. This memory, in turn, is of a social character and belongs to a group rather than to individuals. Halbwachs, who was critical of Bergson’s subjectivism, remains to some extent under its influence. He replaces individual activity with group activity but he preserves the same pattern. Therefore, there is no real relationship between the individual and its group. An individual is merely a transmitter of collective memory, its embodiment. If an individual is independent from a group he gradually loses memory; the remembrance become more and more difficult. His freedom is achieved in dreams but they are, of course, lacking the logical structure of thought. For this reason, an individual cannot participate in the construction of time as this construction is mainly a process of recalling past events for present purposes. The advantages of Halbwachs’ approach are, however, obvious. He introduced the social dimension to the problem of time and showed the ways in which society coined its identification through traditions. His theoretical perspective opened up a space for investigation of the role of tradition which is of great importance for the social sciences. There have been a number of empirical studies done in the area of collective memory exploring different dimensions of this phenomenon.43 At this moment I would like, however, to discuss some recent contributions to the theory of collective memory. Paul Connerton, in his influential book How societies remember,44 focuses on the body as a locus of remembering. He distinguishes three kinds of memory: personal memory claims which centre on our own experience, cognitive memory claims, that is, a capacity to reproduce a certain kind of knowledge, and habit-memory, which is a capacity to reproduce a certain performance.45 For the author, the most important kind of memory is habit-memory. This category of memory allows him to overcome Halbwachs’ identification of social and individual memory. From Holbwachs’ perspective, Connerton argues, it is impossible to explain the relationship between individual and social memory. As a consequence Holbawchs is not able to answer the question, “how are these collective memories passed on within the same social group from one generation to the next?”46 To answer this we need to acknowledge that “much of what is being subsumed under that term [collective memory] refers … to facts of communication between individuals.”47

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Connerton argues that the most important point in researching collective memory is to find the acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible. He finds such acts in “ritual action.” Rites are characterized by three distinctive features. First, he claims, rites are not merely expressives; they can discharge emotions but this is not their central purpose. Second, they are not merely formal. Connerton seems to occlude the simple opposition between formal rites and “authentic” utterances or acts. Third, rites “have the capacity to give value and meaning to the life of those who perform them.”48 The author seems thus to ascribe to rites two important characteristics. They comprise activity of a symbolic character which directs the attention of the participants to objects of special significance.49 They also always involve continuity with the past because of their repetitive character. After detailed analysis of ritual commemorative ceremonies, Connerton comes to the conclusion that, “if there is such a thing as social memory, we are likely to find it in commemorative ceremonies.”50 However, such ceremonies are only a part of social memory. It is physically located in the bodies of the members of a particular society and these “bodily practices” are an important source of social memory. “Our bodies … keep the past also in an entirely effective form in their continuing ability to perform certain skilled action … Many forms of habitual skilled remembering illustrate a keeping of the past in mind that, without ever adverting to its historical origin, nevertheless re-enacts the past in our present conduct. In habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body.”51 Connerton distinguishes between two types of bodily practices: incorporating practices and inscribing practices. An incorporating practice is “a smile, or handshake or words spoken in the presence of someone we address.” These acts “are all messages that a sender or senders impart by means of their own current bodily activity, the transmission occurring only during the time that their bodies are present to sustain that particular activity.”52 These activities can be intentional or not; they can also be performed by an individual or a group. The second type of action is what Connerton calls an inscribing practice. He describes it as “our modern devices for storing and retrieving information, print, encyclopedias, indexes, photographs, sound tapes, computers, all require that we do something that traps and holds information, long after the human organism has stopped informing. Occasionally this imparting may be unintentional, as when we have our telephone tapped, but mostly it is intentional.”53 Connerton emphasizes the importance of these practices for the transfer of experience from one generation to another. From this point of view, the incorporated practices are of special significance. He gives the

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example of culturally specific bodily postures and their memorization. What is especially interesting is that “[P]ostural behavior … may be very highly structured and completely predictable, even though it is neither verbalized nor consciously taught … The presence of living models … is essential to the communication in question.”54 The incorporating practices are less formal and less schematic than ceremonial liturgical performances, in which every gesture is closely defined. However, Connerton sees a continuity in the level of formality and he distinguishes between ceremonies of the body, properties of the body, and techniques of the body. Techniques of the body are the least formal; an example is the case of gesture. Connerton quotes research done on this case which compared the gestures of two groups of Jews from different parts of Europe and showed convincingly that “the availability of particular gestural repertoires in the hand movements of individuals of either group depends largely on their history, their cultural belongingness; and the appropriate performance of the movements drawn from the repertory both depends upon the habit memory of their members and tacitly recalls their memory of communal allegiance.”55 As an example of properties of the body Connerton discusses table manners. Following the classic work of Norbert Elias, he claims that because of bodily properties the rules of etiquette and the rules of the court are reproduced and remembered. They are remembered as habit-memories, habitually observed rules. Ceremonies of the body are illustrated by the way in which the French nobility of the seventeenth century displayed their privileged status. “These ceremonial privileges were a mnemonics of the body, a constant reminder of the order of estates.”56 Connerton insists that the memory of the body is not just a different kind of descriptive knowledge, a different kind of writing out of the sign. Following Dewey’s concept of habit he considers it to be a complicated phenomenon with a strong component of emotion and desire. Therefore, habit is neither merely repetition of action nor the representation of linguistic meaning: “a meaningful practice does not coincide with a sign; meaning cannot be reduced to a sign which exists on a separate ‘level’ outside the immediate sphere of the body’s acts. Habit is a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and in the body; and in cultivation of habit it is our body which ‘understands’.”57 With his concepts of bodily practices and bodily memory Connerton is able to overcome some limitations of the cognitive concept of memory and remembrance. By doing this he also provides a useful link between studies of memory and contemporary ideas about the social character of the body developed by Pierre Bourdieau and Michel Foucault. Insisting

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that the body has to be understood on its own terms he seems even more radical than the majority of body-oriented social scientists. In his claim that “body is seen to be socially constituted in the sense that it is constructed as an object of knowledge or discourse; but the body is not seen equally clearly to be socially constituted in the sense that it is culturally shaped in its actual practices and behavior”,58 he rightly turns our attention to the silent language of bodily action which cannot be directly conceptualized in the language of a social theory. This approach shows that our idea of the past is located beyond its language conceptualization and in fact presupposes it. We inherit the memory of the particular past of the groups we belong to, and to some extent we are not able to overcome the limitations the past imposes on us because these limitations become part of our bodies. Viewed from this perspective, the past becomes a part of the “social ontology” which defines the deepest layers of the social world. At this point, however, one can raise an objection to Connerton’s viewpoint. He, like Holbwachs, seems to be preoccupied only with one aspect of time: memory and remembrance. This prevents him from recognizing the variety of functions these bodily practices can have besides the repetition of the same socially formed acts. If we consider the whole sequence of time – the past, the present, and the future – it turns out that these bodily memories, although they originated in the past, can serve as a vehicle to encounter the future. They form the means of reaction to future events and help to anticipate them. Connerton is right in his emphasis of bodily practices as distinct from their language conceptualization. However, the issue seems to be more complicated than he has conceived it. First, there is no clear distinction between bodily practices and cognitive practices. The work of psychologists (Jean Piaget’s school is the most important from this point of view) show convincingly that the movements of the body can express very complicated cognitive operations. Therefore, even if we are dealing only with the language of the body it is possible to translate these activities into the language of cognition. Second, such a translation is necessary if we want to share our knowledge with others in a more general, universal form. The language of the body always tends towards the concrete, so even if we agree with Connerton that it is not merely a series of signs or meanings, it always sends us out to a reality which can be dealt with in a discursive manner. Perhaps in these complicated relations between the universality of discourse and the concreteness of bodily actions the puzzle of the transfer of social memory through individuals can be solved.

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Bodily practices are a part of human action and as such they are directed at the fulfilling of future goals. The creative character of action denotes the constant overcoming of existing reality and the attainment of new domains. This idea is involved in different concepts of action, including the Weberian idea of the rational character of human action and the Habermasian concept of communicative action. I prefer, however, the pragmatic concept of action, according to which an action has a creative character in the sense that it is not an activity directed to achieving preestablished purposes, but a chain of adjustments and readjustments to changing conditions in the environment. This idea, which was only outlined in Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy, finds its full expression in the work of John Dewey and George H. Mead. Hans Joas presents the pragmatic concept of action as follows: For the pragmatists, the setting of ends is not an act of consciousness that takes place outside of contexts of action. Rather, the setting of an end can only be a result of reflection on resistances encountered by the variously oriented behavior of a life form whose world is always already schematized in a practical manner prior to all reflection. If it proves to be impossible to follow simultaneously all of the different impulses or compulsions directing our action, then the selection of a dominant motivation can occur that will, as an end, dominate all of the others or allow them to come into play only secondarily. Such a clear orientation to a single end is, however, by no means the normal case. By its nature, action is only diffusely teleological.59

However, even if action is only partly teleological it is also always a creative response to changes in the environment, and as such it has to be future oriented in order to find a solution to problems existing in the present. Therefore, the future is not a conscious choice of human beings, but rather is deeply embedded even in the simplest forms of action. This applies also to social action, which although different in structure, is in the same way future oriented. This dimension is just as neglected by Connerton as it had been by Halwachs. Both Halbwachs and Connerton are, however, right in their approach to time as a social phenomenon. To develop their perspective I will start with the contemporary theory of social ontology put forward by John Searle. He focuses mainly on social objects but his intuitions can easily be extended into the realm of time. His basic thesis is that social ontology is constituted by institutional facts which have the form: “X counts as Y in context C.”60 Temporal facts, as far as they are institutional, need, like other social facts, a special set of institutions invested with authority to choose and set up an event and the forms of its observances. The particularity of temporal constructions consists in their directing at two tasks: preserving at the same time the uniqueness

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and repetitiveness of an event. We are born once, but we need our birthday as the confirmation of our uniqueness as well as the confirmation of the flow of time and our place in this stream of time. Celebrations of anniversaries of an important event are another example of the same tendency. In this case, however, the issue is more complicated as the choice of the event and the form of its celebration has a social character. Searle’s conception, however, due to his extensively used parallel with the physical world, has an important limitation: it concentrates almost exclusively on social cohesion. He says that the “basic structure” of the construction of social reality is: “We collectively accept, acknowledge, recognize, go along with, etc., that (S has power (S does A))” or in abbreviated form “We accept (S has power (S does A)).”61 Searle is able to deduce with this basic formula a lot of consequences dealing with the structure of the social world. He is probably right as far as “normal” society is concerned.62 Then, the problem of recognition is masked by the dominance of an exclusive ideology, which serves as an authority underlying the construction of social reality. This is, however, a borderline case, even if at some point the petrification of a certain society can create the illusion of absolute stability. The problem with Searle’s construction appears immediately when we consider societies in transition, with visible struggles for recognition and legitimization. Searle, to be sure, also considers the case of authority losing its power. The full formula for such a case is “We accept (S is out) if we accept (S leaves the field))” or in shorter version: “We accept ( S has power ( S leaves the field)).”63 However, it is difficult to recognize this formula as accounting for the complicated problem of the struggle between different authorities. It is derived from the basic structure by the purely formal operation of negation. Therefore, it tells us nothing about the process of struggling for recognition, which is at the core of the constitution of an actual society. The real problem for social philosophy is to reveal the mechanism which makes it possible to remove a certain form of power and replace it with another. Achieving this purpose requires supplementing logical analysis of social time with an anthropological analysis of time as a function of social institutions and social habits. There is a common anthropological assumption that societies can differ according to their time schedule. E.R. Leach in his classic works on time states that there are two distinct classes of experiences which form our intuition of time. First, “certain phenomena of nature repeat themselves” Second, “life change is irreversible.”64 Leach seems to

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think the existential dimension of the experience of time is the most important, but he also argues that we need religion in order to recognize these two sets of phenomena as the same: It seems to me that if it were not for religion we should not attempt to embrace the two aspects of time under one category at all. Repetitive and non-repetitive events are not, after all, logically the same. We treat them both as aspects of “one thing”, time, not because it is rational to do so, but because of religious prejudice. The idea of Time, like the idea of God, is one of those categories which we find necessary because we are social animals rather than because of anything empirical in our objective experience of the world.65

Further, he argues that important social events such as festivals serve not only as a measurement of time but “in fact we create time by creating intervals in social life.”66 Time is constructed in social consciousness and it can run slower or faster in different societies. This idea appears also in anthropology dealing with contemporary societies. Here it is worth mentioning the work of Kathrine Verdery as she uses the concept of time as a social construction in her analyses of Eastern Europe. She cities different concepts of time in capitalism and socialism as one of the main reasons for the collapse of the latter. Capitalism, with its obsession with the efficient use of time, as with the efficient use of other resources had to defeat socialism with its outdated concept of time which was expressed in the economy of shortage. She concludes her remarks on the causes of the collapse of socialism with the observation that “the fall of socialism lies … in the collision of two differently constituted temporal orders, together with the notions of person and activity proper to them.”67 Moreover, she suggests that the acceptance of Western temporal hegemony was of the greatest importance for the failure of socialism. Time thus is established by institutions and, at the same time, it has influenced the idea of the self and its activity. This relationship is described in Verdery’s paper on the etatization of time in Ceausescu’s Romania. At that time Romania was an extreme case of the subordination of individuals to state power. Verdery points out that one of the main factors of this oppression was the seizure of time. She links this seizure to the activity of human bodies. “There are a number of means through which time can seized – rituals, calendars, decrees (such as curfews), workday schedules, and so on. My discussion focuses on the vehicle through which these devices organize time: the body, site of many possible uses of time, only some of which can be actualized … I treat time as a medium of activity that is lodged in and manifested through human bodies”68 As an outcome of her subtle analysis of the different expressions of time being entirely controlled

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and distributed by the state agencies, she concludes that, “By insinuating itself and its temporalities into people’s projects and impeding those projects through the medium of people’s very bodies, this regime reproduced every day people’s alienation from it.”69 Consequently two orders of time emerge; that of citizens and that of the regime. “For the Party leadership, time was in a process of culminating, of becoming for all time. For everyone else, however, time was running out. In December of 1989, it finally did – for the leadership, as well.”70 Pursuing her investigations into the construction of time through human bodies, Verdery turns her attention to dead bodies, writing a book of the use of them in political conflicts.71 She argues convincingly that the reburial of some important dead persons can serve as an instrument of changing the past and restructuring memory in such a way that it justifies the existing political order. To describe the change of time we need concepts of different orders of time. Basing her analysis on E.R.Leach’s essay, Verdery enumerates the following time orders: linear time, which may be slanted upward (progress) or not (simple reproduction), and cyclical time; she also differentiates time that is continuous from time that is discontinuous such as revolutionary time or religious time. She concludes: [T]emporal conceptions are crucial elements of human experience. They ground it by establishing the largely unconscious expectations within which people live out their lives … That, in turn, has implications for the matter of accountability, which I mentioned above: whether the accountable action is seen to be the responsibility of autonomous individual subjects, of ghosts, or of collective actors will affect decisions about punishment or compensation.72

Verdery points out that those temporal orientations can compete with each other or can change in the course of societal development. The situation of the transformation is a good example of such changes. She observes that: [A]mong the more unsettling aspects of temporal transformation, I believe, is the possibility that the temporal experiences and conceptions familiar to people during the socialist period are being changed, especially for elites. Intellectual and political elites feel themselves caught in a terrible time bind, for example; many complain that the pace of their lives has become dizzying and almost unbearable, compared with before.73

People in post-communist societies have to face the struggle between different political forces which could be associated with different temporalities. Verdery shows that these temporalities remain in complicated relationships with the political options. For instance, nationalists can opt for a linear time as well as for a circular time. In

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each case, however, they would see different objectives as the most important for the survival of the nation. The “cyclical nationalists” “will give high priority to promoting the nation’s biological and social reproduction, through antiabortion policies and restrictions on minoritylanguage education for those of other nationalities.”74 The “linear nationalists” will “see the nation’s fate wrapped up more with its economic viability than with its demography.”75 Different time perspectives can, in turn, generate specific political alliances, for instance the “linear nationalists” might collaborate with neo-liberals or even market oriented post-communists on the issues concerning economic growth. Verdery’s account of social time, although sketchy and lacking philosophical fundamentals, seems to point in the right direction. She shows that the time perspectives adopted by groups play not only the role of frames of remembrances76 but also serve in projecting the future. Therefore, social time is not limited to the function of repeating and strengthening social identity but lays frameworks for social action. There could be different time orders in the same society coexisting or competing with each other. The problem, however, remains unsolved in Verdery’s work, of what the relationship might be between constructed social time and political programs. Does the perception of time determine the political program or the other way round? This question entails a whole set of issues pertaining to the problems of the role of conscious activity in changing time perspectives and the necessity of having the proper time perspective for the proper social order.

Politics of Memory, Politics of Time In the previous parts of this chapter I show different approaches to the problem of social time. I think that it is not possible to present an integrated model of social time which would include all or most aspects of the constitution of social time which emerge from these conceptions. My idea is to look at how those concepts of social time can work in the context of my notions of political and social time. However, I am not going just to enumerate what I have found interesting for my own thinking but instead I prefer to share with the reader my intuitions about difficulties which arise when one discusses the relationship between time structure of society and the constitution of the social and the political.

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Johannes Fabian in his seminal work on time and anthropology states that ““…geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.”77 In his book he shows the ways in which Time was used by that powers that be to execute political control and through the idea of the neutrality of Time to conceal the real significance of time structure for the conception of the progress of civilization. Using very rich material from the history of anthropology he points out convincingly that “[N]either political Space nor political Time are natural resources. They are ideologically construed instruments of power.”78 Although I share most of Fabian’s insights on the role of political time and agree that it is anthe instrument of ideological domination, my aim is different. I would like to take up the issue of the inner structure of the political and social time and to show the consequences of this structuralization for the shape of society. As I have avowed several times, my motivation for writing this book has been mainly an attempt to account for the discussion on the communist past so important for the formation of identity of post-communist Poland and other postcommunist countries. Everybody in these countries feels the importance of this debate but at same time it leaves people with a sensethe mood of chaos and disappointment as the debateit has come to a standstill. This standstill has resulted from the growing consciousness of the observers of the debate that what is really at stake is not truth about the past but the use of the past to assert domination in the political life. This situation of disillusionment as to the possibility of finding a “neutral” narrative about the past gives a unique opportunity to have an insight into the structure of political and social time. At the same time, the overlap of two independent albeit interwoven phenomena: the politics of memory and the politics of time – further complicates this issue. On the one hand, the debate about the past is importantly an issue of what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten. This choice is crucial for a lot of decisions concerning all spheres of social life. Retribution, punishment, moral condemnation but also reconciliation are only a few of many questions discussed in the context of what is generally called transitional justice. There isis a great variety of ways in which nations try to come to terms with the past injustice. This diversity makes any attempt to create a consistent theoretical model futile. Jon Elster in his book on transitional justice, which is the best review of its cases from Ancient Athens to post-communism, declines from offering any theoretical model for transitional justice and instead he proposes a close examination of different examples.79

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He analyses various aspects of particular cases of transitional justice and with the great erudition shows the complications of sociological and psychological mechanisms underlying decisions as to how to proceed with retribution after the change. He also demonstrates how transitional justice works and how much the outcomes of this process harmonize with the premises and procedures invented to overcome the past. Although Elster, as I have already mentioned, never proposes any model, reading his book leaves the reader with an impression that the domain of transitional justice is not a story with a happy end. It brings about more dilemmas than can be accommodated by society and, even more, it depends on current politics rather than on anythe transcendental sense of morality. In my view, the politics of memory necessitates first of all an examination of how memory is used for current politics. So, what is for Elster one of many points of departure is in my book the main referent, of the relation between memory and politics. Further, I believe that the use of memory in politics does not have a merely instrumental dimension. The important question is that the problem of memory itself is presupposed by the solutions concerning decisions about the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. Therefore, I use the phrase “political time” to make clear implicate that the political usage of memory is interwoven with implicated in the time structure accepted by society. In a sense I try to integrate the conceptions of social time with the ideas about the social significance of memory. Social memory is always inscribed into a time order which is taken for granted by society and which is condensed in the slogans like: “liberate the past from the future” or “liberate the future from the past” or “liberate the present from the past and the future”. However, I think that besides the usage of memory for current political objectives, there is a more profound level of time structure, which I label social time as distinctive from political time. In my conception of political time I draw on sources from philosophy and studies of memory whereas in my notion of social time I rely on anthropological data concerning the concept of time in various societies and on psychological and sociological data showing the importance of expectations for social activity. These relatively fixed ontologies of expectations serve as a point of departure for the constitution of political time and ultimately for the usage of memory in political struggle. Those levels of time structure, which I distinguish for the sake of clarity, are not of course separate and they do not remain in the relation of simple implication. They can interact with each other and they can be internally split in the same society. Different groups of the society can

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accept various political times and various social times. We have then the situation of conflicting memories and conflicting ontologies of expectations, which as a whole is of course a battlefield for political domination. Such a situation is typical for societies passing through change. In the long run there is a tendency to normalize political and social time which means that at some point the hegemonic relation has to be established and accepted by the whole society. We await the end of this process in Poland with interest.

Epilogue

What has Happened to Us? The Rise of Post-post-communism The Emergence of Post-post-communism or Populist Post-communism What has really happened in Poland since the election of 2005? This question is not only an issue of the current politics but also a problem for social theory. In Chapter 1, I outlined the events which led to the emergence of the new form of post-communist society. After such spectacular events as lustration and questioning solidarity with the European Union, a problem has arisen: to define the real substance of this new form of society. The answer is neither trivial nor easy. First, the ruling party (Law and Justice) states its goal in moral rather than political terms. They use the language of “moral revolution” or talk of the “Fourth Republic” never trying to explain the exact meaning of these categories. Second, the official rhetoric of the government is posited mainly in negative terms which of course is connected with its moral involvement. The representatives of the ruling party are quite clear as to what they do not want but very vague on the desired state of things. Therefore if we ask about the real purposes of their activity the answer is always dramatic but unclear. They use extensively the language of struggle but it is very ambiguous who is the enemy and what is at stake in the war. They declare that they intend to eradicate corruption, and the establishment, understood as the everlasting connections between the former nomenklatura, especially the former secret service, and the politicians of the Third Republic, which spoiled the social life of the country; but on the other hand they never show the preferred state of things which would indicate that they have achieved a victory in their war. So their language is full of mysterious ambiguities. On the one hand, they claim that their main purpose is a radical break with the past of the communist regime as well as of the post-

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communism of the Third Republic. On the other hand, they are obsessed with the past. The majority of their activity is directed at clearing the traces of the past which, according to their opinion, are still present in the existing social system. They, of course, refuse to be a continuation of post-communism, all the more of communism, but they also deny that they are the end of transformation, as it led to all the distortions they would like to fight. So they are at the same time inside and outside of the process of transformation. This language, because of its ambivalence, helps to attract votes but makes any theoretical reflection almost impossible. But it has been very clear since the election of 2005 that radical change has happened in Poland. Even if it is very difficult to connect this change to our existing language, it deserves its own name. I have therefore decided to use the label “post-post-communism”, which is just as vague as the language of this formation. Using this label I intend to show both the continuities with post-communism and the break with this formation. I think that although post-post-communism appears in its most developed stage in Poland, it is by no means specific only to Poland. We can find its elements everywhere in the post-communist countries, but what may be surprising is that they are present also in the West; in Western Europe and the U.S. This post-post-communist formation can be label also as “populist post-communism” because it has a lot in common with populist ideology as developed at the end of the twentieth century in Western Europe. But what is peculiar to Poland is that the populists are in power. So populist post-communism is at the same time “populism in power”. Among many definitions of populism the most general one is that populism is by its nature a movement questioning the system. This nonsystemic character of populism makes the “populism in power” label almost contradictory in itself. This oxymoronic character of the phrase “populism in power” gives rise to many, indeed almost all, the ambiguities found in the language of the government. Two discourses, that of power and that of populism, interfere with each other and this interference causes the constant tension in language and in action. Populist post-communism opposes itself to the previous stage in the post-totalitarian history of Poland which in the main I have called “liberal post-communist.” Liberal post-communism was described and analysed by many pundits just as “post-communism” (nobody at that time even thought of the next post-communist formation). I would like just to recall the distinctive feature of liberal post-communism. It was founded on the conviction that introducing free-market relations in the

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economy would almost automatically result in the creation of a democratic liberal system in all other spheres of social life. This never happened and populist post-communism has drawn conclusions from this failure. It has rejected not only this automatic relation between the liberal economy and liberal politics but it has also questioned the principles of liberal democracy.

What is Post-post-communism? As I indicated above, it is very difficult to enumerate the characteristics of post-post-communism or institutionalized populism. It evades any definite description because of ambiguities inherent in its very meaning. However, taking into account contradictory tendencies and actions, I intend to attempt to show the main constitutive features of this formation. The most visible inclination is to replace civil society with the state apparatus. This tendency is a consequence of an aspiration to the maximal concentration of power in one centre. In the Polish case this tendency has found its expression in the Kaczynski twins, Lech and Jaroslaw, occupying two of the most prestigious positions in the country (the President and Prime Minister), but of course post-post-communist does not assume such a biological concentration of power. Nevertheless the state apparatus exercises dominance over the other sectors of society. There is a strong trend in post-post-communist policy to believe that only a strong executive can clean society from all the distortions brought about by post-communism. So the police and secret services of various kinds enjoy a special status and privileges, providing of course that they are not stained by collaboration with the previous regime, that of postcommunism. The executive branch of government also starts to prevail over the legislative and the judiciary. Their traditional prerogatives are called into question or at least undermined by the strong executive. What is interesting is that this tendency goes against the dominant trend in the first Solidarity (1980–1981) the movement which formed the Kaczynski brothers’ political sensitivity. Solidarity was an organization where openness and the idea of civil society as opposed to state power was taken to an extreme. The Law and Justice party however puts stress on the multiplication of various instances of control organized by the state. Thus as an expression of this tendency we see increasingly the dominance of the executive over the legislative and the judiciary. The Sejm (parliament) is reduced to the function of accepting the decisions

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of the ruling coalition, and the Constitutional Tribunal is constantly attacked for not supporting the decisions made by the government. The most visible case of this clash with the legal system was the decision of the Constitutional Tribunal on lustration. It struck down the law and ordered the government and the Sejm to amend it. After that Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski reprimanded the Tribunal not only for this particular decision but also for its general activity which put brakes on the speed of government-led changes. What is the source of the legitimization of power in this system? It seems that it is the past. The idea of overcoming the past plays a crucial role in justifying the different and even the most dubious strategies of the ruling party. Overcoming the communist past was, in their view, never achieved by the various governments of post-communist Poland. Moreover this period added new distortions of social life to those inherited from the communists, so that the post-communist past must now be also overcome. Thus, to change the country it is necessary to overcome the past or in a sense to change it. Several activities have been set in motion to achieve this task. The most important are lustration and the politics of history. Lustration was presented as a procedure which was suppose to clear the past and tell apart the good from the bad. To make such a differentiation the government decided to put almost 700,000 people to the test. They were supposed to answer a question about their possible collaboration with the communist secret service. So the government wanted all teachers, journalists, academics to answer the question: “Was I an agent? Or wasn’t I?” With paranoid detail, we were provided with a list of categories of possible involvement in such activity and all of us had to work out whether or not we were a “live contact box,” a “radiotelegraphic,” an “illegal (sic!) agent of intelligence” and even more mysterious roles unfortunately (maybe for non-Poles fortunately!) untranslatable. The paradox of this situation consisted in the dual methods of clearance (lustration). Apart from our declarations the Institute for National Memory was to prepare a list of people registered as agents. Moreover, special prosecutors were hired exclusively for the verification of our declarations. So any person supposed to declare his or her innocence or involvement in collaboration with the secret service had to face such possibilities: he could be taken as innocent, as guilty of being a secret collaborator, as a liar in the process of lustration, or he or she could be acquitted by the court but anyway figured on the list as a “contact”, and, although such a list was to be just a register prepared by the communist secret service, one’s name on the list would have the

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effect of an irremoveable contamination. In addition, people who were not on time with the declaration had to be punished in the same way as liars, that is, they were to be suspended from fulfilling any “public role” for ten years. As the procedure concerned among others journalists and academic professors, those who for any reason opposed this formula were to be forbidden to teach and do research for ten years or, in the case of journalists, to publish their articles, because such was the definition of the public role of these groups. I don’t wish to go deeper into details as they are boring in their bureaucratic systematization, but what is worth noting is that this operation, contrary to assertions by the government, had nothing in common with the real closing of the book on the past regime. It was to be an instrument for humiliating the whole social group which was perceived by the people in power as a danger in developing their social, political, and cultural strategy. The law has been rejected by the Constitutional Tribunal but the problem is still open as the government is going to prepare a new version of the lustration law. The other side of the same coin is the politics of history which is extensively propagated by the government. This politics of history discloses also another important part of the activity of the ruling coalition, namely the ideologization of the state. The state is supposed actively to promote certain values and also actively to fight others. The state’s ideological involvement can take different forms and the politics of history is the main one of them. The term, which was coined even before the election of 2005, means that history should serve as a tool for building up pride in the achievements of Poland. The proponents of the politics of history accuse “the liberals” who ruled Poland between 1989 and 2005 of depicting only the dark sides of Polish history and trying to implement this picture as an obligatory image in schools, universities, the press and media. In contrast to them the partisans of the government intend to depict Polish accomplishments and from such an image start to work on creating Polish identity. As to the communist period, the politics of history regards it as a “blank space” in Polish history and the resistance to communist power is the most important coefficient in the evaluation of actions and attitudes of people living at that time. So the image of the communist period is bipolar: on the one side, a few proponents of the communist regime who are denounced as the betrayors of the nation, and on the other the mass of people who opposed the regime. So the nation has always been innocent and it has suffered oppression at the hands of foreign oppressors using a handful of Polish collaborators. In the Penal Code there was even a law introduced that

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anyone who denounced the Polish Nation as complicit in carrying out the crimes of the Nazi or Stalinist period should be punished with two years in prison. This ideologization of the state is even more visible in education. The Department of Education in the government was given to Roman Giertych, the leader of the extreme right-wing nationalist and religious party League of Polish Families. He has introduced a kind of ideological indoctrination into school programs. For instance he has changed the canon of literature taught in Polish schools. He tried to remove writers who, like Witold Gombrowicz, are critical of the Polish nation and instead include those who, as Henryk Sienkiewicz, praise Polish virtues. How important this ideologization of the state is, was shown in the struggle between the Minister of Culture, representing Law and Justice, and the Minister of Education over the canon. The final decision had to be made by the Prime Minister, who reestablished Witold Gombrowicz’s novel in the canon. It was probably a unique event in democratic countries that the Prime Minister had to decide about a minute detail of the school curriculum! However nobody from the government intervened when Roman Giertych introduced a mandatory dress code, warned principals against the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools, or made religious classes equal to other school subjects, which has been thought to heighten the role of religion in school curricula. The Deputy Minister of Education, Miroslaw Orzechowski, member of the same party as Roman Giertych, has officially condemned the theory of evolution and openly encouraged teachers to include elements of the theory of intelligent design in their instruction. The ideologization of the state presents a whole spectrum of different activities from the radically extreme to the moderate but its main task is to preserve traditional values and especially religious values in the face of modernization. The model of modernization is an idealized Bavaria which safeguarded traditional values and at same time is highly modernized in the technological sense. To achieve this state Poland should be protected from the influence of cultural modernization by which Western Europe has been infected. So an inevitable part of postpost-communism is suspicion of Western Europe. This creates the next inner contradiction in this formation, as Western Europe is at same time, through the European Union, the main source of modernization which is a necessary condition for the strength of the nation. Therefore the postpost-communist formation is bound to more or less open Euroscepticism. This anti-Europeanism is expressed in foreign policy as insistence on preserving for the nation-state the main prerogatives of sovereignty but it

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plays also an important role in internal politics. Namely it allows the government to “export” inner contradictions into foreign policy. In other words the tension between national values and the dominance of liberal discourse in the economy with its obvious cosmopolitan bias is resolved by a hard policy of defending Polish interests against the cosmopolitan, bureaucratic European Union. This strategy can work at least to get votes from those voters who would like to see Poland as besieged by secular environment of other EU countries.

Democracy against Democracy or Who has Hijacked the Common Background? In contemporary political theory it has become more and more clear that something more than the merely formal principles of political procedure is necessary for the functioning of democracy. Tacit consensus as to values and rules is essential for accomplishing of the purposes of democratic institutions. However, it is also clear that such a consensus can be achieved roughly speaking in two ways. In some societies it appears almost automatically as a feeling of sharing the common good which is accepted unreflectedly and never questioned. In such societies of course it is possible to have even sharp disagreements over action in concrete situations but this common background is never seriously damaged. In other societies this common background gets eroded because of the appearance of different values and ways of life, so another means of establishing social cohesion is required. It consists of a consensus as to the rules of procedure and of achieving a common standpoint. Some of these rules are written in law but some are still part of tacit knowledge or a common background. Poland for historical reasons was for many years (at least after the end of the eighteenth century) an example of the first kind of society. Poles shared common codes and tropes which allowed them to resist foreign powers. To a great extent this situation was preserved under the communist regime. Briefly speaking the most important parts of Polish consciousness were the nation and the family, which sometimes overlapped, creating an illusion of the nation as an extended family. This idea of extended family was nevertheless not illusionary as long as people could use the same language for their orientation in personal and social life. So people at extreme different ends of the political spectrum could easily use language of the same values or the same metaphors to serve as signposts for finding their routs in the political. They lived in the same Lebenswelt, they shared

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very similar experiences from childhood, and they shared the same religious-national values, even if some of them decided to reject their metaphysical and eschatological fundamentals. Perhaps this common background was an illusion emerging from the profound split in the society caused by the communist power. Fighting against the communist regime people believed that the only possibility of resistance was to keep to the traditional set of values. If so it was an illusion shared by the majority of Polish people. This common background was destroyed after the transformation of 1989–90. Poland on the route to modernization became more and more differentiated and this automatic consensus was lost. This destruction of common background has brought about two contradictory social phenomena. On the one hand the need has arisen to construct a new system of achieving a consensus; on the other hand there has appeared more and more longing for re-establishing of the system of shared values, which could create again the feeling of belonging to the same family. The weakness of liberal tradition in Poland meant that the latter tendency became dominant. It seems that the Kaczy´nski brothers have been able to convince a significant portion of electorate that they can reverse the tendencies leading to a plural, complicated society with different sets of values competing on the political stage and return to a realtively monolithic, homogeneous society with clear divisions between “us” and “them”. This strategy helped them to come to power but its realization needs a total reconstruction of the political field. To accomplish such a program it is necessary to create a model of democracy which would is not a liberal democracy. Law and Justice (PiS) has presented pretty consistent model of non-liberal democracy. Its characteristic feature is restrictedness; only people who share the national and religious values can participate in politics. There are no of course plans to strip them of their political rights but rather to undermine their moral legitimization to participate in politics. This position is at a higher level justified by intellectuals linked to PiS (Law and Justice) party as a struggle between liberalism and republicanism. Whereas liberalism is perceived as something foreign to the Polish tradition, republicanism is for them the real hard core of Polish political heritage. It is supposed to be a project based on the tradition of the Polish “gentry democracy” 16th and 17th century. Republicanism as opposed to liberalism is to contain such virtues as the acceptance of national and religious values, and ever active involvement in pursuit them. Instead of the liberal concept of a pluralistic society we have according to republican ideology a homogeneous society acknowledging the same values and ready to

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defend them in any situation of real or seeming danger. The state, through its influence on education, should help to promote these values. Also of anti-liberal character is also the concept of overcoming the past where effectiveness in eliminating of the remnants of communism is more important than keeping to legal procedures and rules. This project is still a democratic one in the sense of popular sovereignty but it is far from the liberal concept of a division between the private and public spheres, and from the idea of the neutrality of state on ideological issues.

Possible Scenarios and Two Conservatisms The project of establishing another democracy has bogged down in the current political situation but the government has been able to introduce at least some its elements, especially in education and culture. As always in a political game the result depends on the combination of more or less contingent elements. Nevertheless, writing under the curse of Hegel’s owl, a social scientist is tempted to outline possible scenarios for the future even if they are merely an extrapolation of existing trends. One possibility is the rise of liberal ideology which could present an alternative model of democracy pushing for the constitution of a pluralistic society which at same time would become a basis for liberal democracy. There are obvious components facilitating such a state of affairs. The main opposition to PiS is PO (Civic Platform), the party which boasts its liberal engagement. However it is not difficult to notice that liberalism appears in Poland in a very restricted version. Liberalism is conceived mainly as the ideology of the free market which is to solve all social and political problems. People who support and who oppose liberalism refer mainly to this free market conception of society. So PiS (Law and Justice) was able easily to play out the battle on its own turf. In a famous spot presented on TV there was shown how a refrigerator was shown as becominges empty after a flat tax proposed by PO was isintroduced. This spot convinced people who feared for their future that a free-market economy could threaten their lives. There was no proper response from PO as its program concentrates mainly on the improvement of the economy via relaxing the state’s regulation of free-market activity. In opposition PO in fact has merely waited for the errors of the ruling coalition and this strategy has so far succeeded, but it also has prevented PO from developing alternative strategies based on liberalism understood not as an ideology of the free market but as a philosophy of human freedom and tolerance. This meaning of liberalism is present in the debates of Polish intellectuals but barely at all

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in Polish politics. When it does appear it is more an import from the EU than home-bred and it is discussed rather as the limits of adaptation of Western European values. Therefore even if PO takes power it is difficult to predict that Polish politics would change in the direction of political liberalism. It is clear that this party will be less obsessed with nationalism and religion but probably it will stay on the same course of a Polish way to modernization. Another possible scenario is a radicalization of the Polish Left. So far the problem for the formation of a left-wing alternative has been the dominance of the post-communist party on this side of political spectrum. SLD (Alliance of the Democratic Left) in fact carried out liberal politics in the economy and slightly left-wing politics in culture. After its defeat in 2005 this party tried to modify its image through changing its leadership to the next generation of activists who are too young to have been involved in the communist regime. It has also transformed its program in the direction of egalitarianism and supporting the rights of employees. At the same time it formed a strategic pact with the remnants of the post-Solidarity Democratic Party which in its various incarnations (Democratic Union, Freedom Union) was mainly responsible for the free-market policy of the years 1989–2005. This alliance gives SLD a kind of legitimization from the former opposition but it also sends a mixed signal to the electorate on the economy and the politics of culture, undermining the left-wing shift enunciated after the defeat of 2005. This defeat gave rise also to an intellectual ferment on the Left of which the best example is a group associated with the journal Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique), but so far this ferment has not had implications for the broader political stage and is limited mainly to intellectual circles. The main problem for the Left is that the Right has been able to achieve hegemony over the concept of the nation, which is the most important signifier in Polish political discussion. An articulation between nationalreligious values and the economic claims of the weaker groups of society turns out to be a fundamental source of successful politics for the Right. So for the Left the main task is to regain control over the meaning of the concept of the nation and to articulate this meaning with the demands of employees. To accomplish this task the Left has however to start its own politics of history as well as to reject the fascination with liberal solutions in the economy. However, the Polish right wing also has its own dilemma. Right-wing politicians have been able to secure their hegemony over the Polish political stage based on the critique of the rule of post-communist parties, but two years after the elections which put them in power it is clear that

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the project of the so-called Fourth Republic is turning out to be a failure. The government has been able to accomplish only a small proportion of its plans and it has got stuck in a mess of banal political games inside the ruling coalition. But of course the end of one political configuration does not automatically mean the establishment of a new order, all the more so when there is no alternative political program. So the right wing still has its chance to introduce changes, even though it has become quite clear that it is split into at least three camps. The first of them is a group of politicians who form the so called conservative wing of PO (Civic Platform). They found themselves in this party instead of PiS (Law and Justice) because of personal animosities but also because of a putative right-wing liberalism. In Polish circumstances this means a symbiosis of free-market economic views with religious and national values and rather limited openness and tolerance to other ideological attitudes. They are against any alliance with the Left and would prefer to rule together with more “civilized” members of PiS. For such a coalition an ideal situation would be a conservative state but one which is rather cautious about the direct intervention in the ideological sphere. National and religious values are to be a tacit background promoted rather by means of cultural activity. Poland should be an important player in the European Union, protecting traditional ideals as much as possible but ready to compromise. This group is to some extent the heir of the open Catholicism which was influenced by French personalism and is gathered around the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. They try to continue this line in the changing circumstances of far more conservative dominance both in the Catholic Church and in Polish society. The second group is associated with a very traditional, very nationalistic vision of Polish society. It is associated with the infamous Radio Maryja, which is the main channel of their propaganda. They are quite powerful, as it is hardly possible to achieve electoral success on the right side of the Polish political stage without the support of Radio Maryja. People who are losers in the process of transformation, who feel dispossessed by the new social reality, who fear the future and who seek consolation in religion are the most loyal audience of this station. They vote exactly as they are instructed by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, the charismatic director of the station. Radio Maryja has caused a lot of turmoil in Poland and even abroad because of anti-Semitic and ultraconservative declarations. I think however that the role of this station is often overestimated and probably its influence is dwindling. The station acts as if it were broadcasting from a besieged fortress; it does not even try to proselytize and Father Rydzyk prefers to preach to

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the converted. The number of supporters, though still significant, is shrinking, as Poland becomes more and more modernized and prosperous. The political role of the station is limited to delegating its adherents to different political parties and to negotiating in exchange new privileges for the Church and new forms of ideologization of the state. One example of this strategy is the debate on abortion, when Radio Maryja promised to support those parties which would vote for a total ban on abortion. Radio Maryja can function only within the hierarchical Church. It has sometimes troubled relations with the Church hierarchy but never directly rebels against it. This is in stark contrast with the third group of conservatives which I would like to call the “Revolutionary Right” or “Revolutionary Conservatism” by analogy with various conservative movements in Europe and the U.S. They are not afraid of the challenges of modernity or post-modernity and they believe that they can shape it in desired forms. Therefore they do not like to confine themselves to a besieged fortress. On the contrary, they are convinced that they can attract not only losers in the transformation but first of all the Polish intellectual and political elites. In politics the new conservatism is not attached to the traditional political parties, as its purpose is much more ambitious than just participation in normal political games. By the same token it refuses to subordinate itself to the Church, as this institution is useful to it only in so far as it can get support from it. Such participation is understood as a tool for the total transformation of Polish society according to traditional values but taking modernized and universal forms. So for revolutionary conservatives traditional values are instrumental for achieving a society in which high-tech modernization would be coupled with resistance to any kind of social or cultural plurality, which is denounced as a threat to European Christian culture and its system of values. Generally speaking there is a clear link between Polish radical conservatives and American neo-conservatives. In both cases an ideal social system would be a combination of religious values with a neoliberal economy. A Polish specificity is its Catholic eschatological and metaphysical cast, and involvement in the Catholic faith by prominent representatives of this tendency. Almost all of them have written books on the currents and subtleties of Catholic theology. I do not think that this radical conservative attitude has a chance to dominate the Polish political stage but it has an important influence on other right-wing political movements. The new conservatism sees its role not so much as a significant power in current politics but more as a source of moral and ethical standards for the whole political spectrum in Poland

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with the clear exception of the majority of the Left. These standards are supposed to be regulators of the way in which politics can be done. They are presented as the necessary link between democracy and truth, as the necessary reference to transcendental values in current politics. If they are translated into more political language they presuppose the rejection of plurality and multiculturalism and the acceptance of homogeneous national-religious values. Some left-wing movements would be thus received under this aegis, especially those which would agree with the political standards prepared by those new conservatives even if they denied the need for eschatological grounding. To establish such a Left is a dream of the new conservatives as it would allow them to dominate the whole political stage.

New Tribalism, Post-post-communism, and the Politics of Time Post-post-communism is very much intermingled in contemporary Polish politics but as a general social project it is a phenomenon that goes far beyond Polish circumstances. It in not even limited to post-totalitarian countries but paradoxically extends to countries which were never under communist rule. Post-post-communism with its combination of populist rhetoric, national values, and neo-liberal ideology in economics is a tempting alternative to liberal democracy, the universality of rights, and the plurality of cultures. Post-post-communism is an expression of the fear of losing identity in the face of globalization, immigration and the power of international institutions. Notable consequences of this fear are the desire for a return to traditional values in the ideological sphere and the stress on the role of state understood as a system of organizations. A strong state is to secure fixed identity and to remove the anxiety of being involved in processes which nobody is able to control. This emphasis on the function of the state is a reversal of the dreams of the dissidents who under the communist regime believed in the possibility of building an ethical politics beyond the state, a politics which was supposed to be an expression of civil society. They tried to lead the process of transformation in this direction and they failed. They failed not only because of the internal contradictions in post-communist countries but also because of the changing political climate in Europe and around the world. In the post-totalitarian countries this rising wave of nationalism met at some point dissatisfaction with the post-communist politics of economic liberalism and at least elements of

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plurality in culture. Instead post-post-communism offers traditional values and a strong state. The worst scenario for the advance of post-post-communism would be its collapsing into a kind of new, modernized tribalism which would combine modern technology with a closing of societies and an attitude of defensiveness respecting their fixed identities. It is hardly possible to estimate the real weight of this threat but it should be a warning sign for current politicians.

Epilogue – Supplement The elections of October 2007 unexpectedly gave power to PO (Civic Platform) which organized its campaign around the slogans of conservative modernization. They promised to be more open in European relations and to promote intensive pro-market modernization, and simultaneously respect for the traditional values of the nation. This time the strategy of PiS failed as it turned out that the majority of Polish people rejected narrow nationalism and a confrontational attitude to the European Union. However, the outcome of the elections is very vague. As the turnout was much higher than in the previous elections, PiS, although defeated, got almost two million votes more and PO was very careful not to tackle sensitive questions of the role of national and religious values in politics. The real loser in the elections has beenis the left. In spite of the intensive campaign and the support of popular expresident Aleksander Kwasniewski,the main coalition on the left – the LiD (The Left and Democrats) – did not get significant support. Therefore the elections seem to confirm the thesis of the fixed rightwing shift in Polish politics. The main question is rather how and to what degree the right-wing values should be implemented rather than whether or not it should be competitive for the left. This all indicates that these two elections may prove to be the beginning of a serious decomposition of the Polish political scene. The question of whether the two missing orientations in Poland – liberalism and leftism – may yet show up as important forces is still the question of the future. Looking from the point of view of chronopolitics, to use Johannes Fabian’s category, the Polish society is generally speaking oriented toward the past. The social time of the Polish society (the ontology of expectations) is predominantly colonized by the attitude toward the traditional national and religious values. People imagine that traditional values should serve as a point of reference in the changing social reality

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for athe long time. This orientation seems to have generated the rightwing shift oin the political stage. However, at the level of political time and politics of memory the Polish society is split into two groups which form the basis for two right- wing parties. PiS represents those people who think that the most important thing is to overcome the communist and post-communist past, whereas those who support PO, although believinge in the validity of the traditional values, are oriented toward the future and rather disregard the problem of the importance of memory for the constitution of the present.

Appendix

Post-communism and Pop Music: Annihilation or Restoration of Memory in Disco-polo1 Leszek Koczanowicz, Agnieszka Zembrzuska

Two Views on Disco-polo: Intellectuals’ “Horror Vacui” and the Nation’s Hope It seems paradoxical that liberation from the communist regime brought about a mood of nostalgia among Polish intellectuals. They feel hopeless in the face of the flood of post-1990 popular culture which has demolished what was so precious for their self-identity. In an article entitled “Pusta plaza” (“The Empty Beach”), Tadeusz Sobolewski, a recognized film critic, perfectly reflects this intellectual attitude of desolation and despair. He starts with the bitter remark, “Now we have everything; what we lack is only a sense of fulfilment,” and, enumerating the different expressions of ideology of a “supermarket culture”, he classifies “disco-polo” as the most dangerous. This kind of native Polish popular disco music appears to him as a frontal attack on all traditional values: “Carnival. No, traditional carnival reinforces the values it parodies. Here in this post-modern pageant [i.e. disco-polo] all boundaries are undermined.” The worse thing is not that disco-polo is restricted to the field of pop culture but that it is, according to Sobolewski, a “nihilistic program of mass culture which remains in dangerous harmony with our despair over the meaning of the roles we play, as expressed in its ideas and sentences.” In such a vacuum, Poles are condemned to live without a past or a future, and lack any sense of utopia necessary for the democratic order, and Sobolewski concludes: “Disco-polo occupies the place abandoned by art.”1

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Sobolewski’s paper was published in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, the most distinguished newspaper of official, liberal opposition in former communist Poland. In post-totalitarian Poland, Tygodnik Powszechny has continued this policy, defending liberal values and class solidarity. For this reason it has been attacked by the right wing of the Polish political scene and by conservative, nationalistic Catholicism. At almost the same time that Sobolewski censured the disco-polo phenomenon in Tygodnik Powszechny, a radical right-wing weekly called Mysl Polska published a paper which presented a dramatically different evaluation of this new expression of popular culture. In the article entitled “Pochwala Disco-Polo” (“A Praise for Disco-Polo”) Lukasz Warzecha contrasts disco-polo with Polish rock or rap. He says that, contrary to the latter, disco polo never insults the nation, nor promotes aggression, nor attacks traditional values or the Catholic Church. The lyrics are about love, loyalty, and sometimes about “patriotism conceived of in an organic sense.” Therefore, it is “too normal and traditional to be appreciated by the progressive media.” In accordance with the mood prevalent on the right wing, the author denounces the progressive elite as a source of confusion in values. “It is not the first case that our enlightened elite thinks they know better what should be taught to the people.”2 Yet this defence of disco-polo against the enlightened (which we suppose means left-wing) elite seems somewhat strange in a rightist newspaper. According to sociological surveys disco-polo is a favourite kind of music among members of the Polish Peasant Party (PSL) and is very popular among the supporters of the post-communists. In some analyses the success of the postcommunists was explained by their attention to people’s feelings of nostalgia which finds expression in disco-polo.

“All Poles” or What is Disco-polo? In order to analyse the history of disco-polo we will have to go back to times which, from today’s perspective, seem more or less exotic. The phenomenon of disco-polo was born at the beginning of the nineties in Polish open-air markets, where illegally-sold tapes with this new kind of music waited for buyers on street stalls. Therefore, the original name given to it was street music. Before it became institutionalized and commercialized, disco-polo gained enormous popularity. As its current name suggests, disco-polo uses a disco rhythm, which is combined with typically Slavic musical forms, such as the polka. It also uses references

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to or paraphrases of common Polish folk or patriotic songs. The first disco-polo groups originated in eastern Poland, in the area around the city of Bialystok. The first group formed in the town of Zyrardow in eastern-central Poland. Played and sung in the country and at provincial fun-fairs, discos, wedding parties and other events, disco-polo’s main purpose is to give people enjoyment, fun, and a temporary relief from everyday troubles. Addressing average Poles, it uses simple, comprehensive language, traditional elements of Polish culture, popular symbols, and national and religious notions. Or as Stanislaw Skreta, one of its supporters, says in an interview: “Disco-polo musicians sing of the things which have been present in our nation for ages and this is why people identify with what they sing.” The references to commonly known and accepted elements of Polish reality – the traditional images of love (tinged with eroticism), and the collective memory, combined with an unsophisticated musical form – cause, first, the possibility of identification with the proposed images, and second, the chance to reach people of various age groups. Discopolo parties are inter-generational and have an additional advantage: unlike rock concerts, they are free from violence and aggression. The lyrics contain no references to drugs, and love is presented in a highly stereotyped way. People connected with the disco-polo business all consider this to be a signal advantage, and regard it as a clear sign of its superiority to rock music. Disco-polo deliberately rejects any aspiration to so-called higher culture, which is considered by its protagonists as too exclusive and therefore incomprehensible to the larger part of Polish society. Of course, this is the shortcoming in eyes of its enemies, but its protagonists emphasize disco-polo’s appeal to the majority of Poles, as a kind of music which unites its authors and audience. “This kind of music is necessary for people. They have a lot of problems and in order to relax they need something light-hearted and easy. We don’t want bands to create music too professionally, because this professionalism can kill the authenticity of the songs and would for sure reduce the public” (Skreta). A strong belief in the cathartic and therapeutic qualities of this music is conspicuous in numerous statements by its authors. It provides one with “an opportunity to uncover oneself” (Skreta); in the changing reality of the last few years it also permits recognition of deeply hidden human abilities. The most popular disco-polo star, Shazza, attributes a healing power to her own personality and musical production. She says: “My concerts and my recordings let people take a breath; they offer

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them an oasis of happiness which lasts as long as you listen to the album, and later on people come back to reality.” Shazza mentions examples of the healing power of her music: “My recordings help to cure. She listened to my recordings, now she’s running; she’s very satisfied and very grateful to me.” A very interesting social phenomenon is the disco-polo concerts held in the detention ward in Warszawa-Bialaka. According to the inmates this music is free from violence, and drunkenness; it “is filled with love, gives a feeling of optimism, reaches people’s minds faster, and in some way changes them” (i.e. the prisoners). Describing themselves as members of a disco-polo band, the artists stress their ordinariness, modest hairdos and clothes, and dislike of extravagance, contrasting themselves to rock musicians. Ordinariness, authenticity, simplicity, easy subjects of everyday life, emotional relations between men and women, and still very vivid patriotic notions, all provided disco-polo music with an exceedingly large audience which varied in age and occupation. So far, about 350 songs have been recorded, and disco-polo concerts and discos have gained great popularity. Yet, curiously enough, despite its success, disco-polo hardly exists in the media. From the outset this music has met with and still is liable to very severe criticism. Journalists object that disco-polo is characterized by simplistic quality, triviality, crudeness, and nationalistic propaganda, all of which make it a species of “muzak”. Disco-polo fans perceive these objections as signs of an elementary lack of tolerance and good manners. They find these charges unjustified as this music is made to give pleasure and fun, and they believe that it fulfils this purpose in attracting and cheering people up. Why then should it not exist and evolve? they ask. The negative criticism and isolation by the public media has by no means caused a decline in its popularity. On the contrary, disco-polo has found a strong supporter in private television. Every week the commercial television station Polsat broadcasts the program Disco relax – the only one that promotes this kind of music in Poland. Disco-polo producers consider it a personal success that the popularity of their music has been gained through hard work and appropriate ideological assumptions, and not (at least at the initial stage) through commercial advertisement and promotion.

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The Glorious Past and the Slavic Soul The ideology of disco-polo is based on an idea of the Polish nation which refers to the tradition of the old-Polish gentry and rural customs. Also characteristic is a clear lack of interest in contemporary Polish history and the dismissal of any form of political dimension in the song lyrics. The cult of old-Polish cultural roots has survived in Polish society down to the present. According to this myth the Polish gentry might have originated with the Sarmatians, a nation living on the Black Sea coast. At the beginning of the Christian era the Sarmatians reached and conquered territories on the Dnieper and the Vistula, and gave birth first to the Polish knighthood and then to the gentry. This cult was revitalized in the prose of the end of the nineteenth century which was written “to give our hearts new courage”. The idealization of the past in that prose aimed at sustaining and edifying the spirit of a nation enslaved by neighbouring countries. Many references to this tradition, such as the “rattling of the sabre”, a predilection for alcohol and light-hearted fun, and Polish spendthrift hospitality, also presented in disco-polo texts, are a continuation of old-Polish themes in Polish culture. The approach to the past in disco-polo texts is enormously selective. It underlines national bonds, the national identity of Poles, both those living in the country and those who for different reasons live abroad. The disco-polo ideology promotes “a collective activity, partnership, mutual respect and cooperation that is needed to climb the social ladder” (Waldemar Pawlak, the leader of peasant party and the former Prime Minister of Poland). This slightly naive rhetoric comes from deeplyrooted Polish stereotypes of the national character, history and the role of Poles in the world. According to the disco-polo ideology, the Poles, though European, whether they like it or not, mentally belong to the East by virtue of their Slavic character. Therefore it is there that Poles should first of all look for their roots and cultural patterns, not trusting too much what is imported from the Western-European cultural zone. The Slavic soul is characterized on the one hand by variety, romanticism and idealism, and on the other, by joyfulness and a disposition towards fun often accompanied by alcohol. Disco-polo owes its success and popularity not to laborious and expensive advertising campaigns but to this very Slavic element. This element, immanent in the texts and music, should appeal to almost everybody and eliminate the conflicts and divisions among Poles in the face of an allembracing feeling of community and national brotherhood best seen in the

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song called “All Poles”, sung by the group Bayer Full. This song is a paraphrase of a popular scouts’ song called “All Scouts.” It is worth citing the refrain of the new version of this song, which in a sense aspires to be a new Polish anthem, and at the same time so well renders the carefree disco-polo spirit, indifferent to matters of patriotism. It goes as follows: “For all the Poles are one family/ older or younger/ a boy or a girl/ Hey, hey, let’s have fun/ Hey, hey, let’s laugh.” The clear stress upon tradition and specifically understood patriotism that is found in disco-polo texts has mainly therapeutic ends – it enables people to deal with national complexes and helps to restore their faith in the Polish patria. This patriotism should integrate Poles in all parts of the world, should reinforce Poland’s independence from foreign powers, and finally should account for the involvement of Poles in spiritual rather than down-to-earth consumer needs. The nationalistic motifs are most exploited by text writers, whose task is to “show that what is the best is Polish”. By this token, disco-polo should become a national export product, i.e., a manifestation of the national culture which “glorifies the name of Poland in the world” and which “offers Europe something very Polish.” Another peculiarly Polish national feature that the ideologists of this movement mention is tolerance towards all nations and religions. This belief concerns particularly the relations between Poles and Jews, who “for a thousand years … have been doing best in Poland” (Swierzynski). It is accompanied by strong disgust at the vociferous debate, which took place lately, concerning the role Poles could have played in the extermination of the Jewish nation during the Second World War. According to disco-polo ideologists, the only national fault of Poles – which in fact should be rather called a merit – is “Polish hospitality,” i.e., excessive sincerity and confidence, an inability to act in a cunning way, and a lack of shrewdness. These traits enable Poles to explain all their misfortunes in the arena of international politics. Shrewdness and cunning are ascribed to Western countries, which are said to take advantage of Poland’s inferior position or even isolate Poland from the blessings of civilization (the reluctance of the West to accept Poland into the European Union is sometimes cited as evidence thereof). This standpoint has been, perhaps too strongly, expressed by Slawomir Swierzynski, the leader of the disco-polo group Bayer Full: “We offer our heart on the plate [read: we wear our heart on our sleeve], and in response they bite us.” Nevertheless, Polish hospitality is an extremely precious trait, one that testifies to the sociability of Poles, but sociability in a very narrow sense, i.e., restricted to the private and informal sphere

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of life. The innate predilection for amusement and revelry justifies the lack of participation in the social and political life of the country, in other words in the public sphere, in accordance with the view that it is absolutely sufficient to realize oneself in the private sphere. Hence there are almost no direct political allusions in the disco-polo texts, either to local or to foreign events. Songwriters deliberately separate themselves from the world of politics: “It’s of no interest to us that somewhere out there they wage a terrible war, we sing for people who wish to relax” (Swierzynski). Instead the interest of disco-polo writers is concentrated on everyday life. Yet the activity of disco-polo musicians, despite their claims that “music knows no borders and is not political at all” (Swierzynski), betrays a kind of inconsistency in terms of political engagement. Discopolo musicians’ participation in the presidential campaign of 1995, when, on an election committee’s request, they wrote songs specially for two presidential candidates, prove this point. These were the compositions “Ole, Olek” of the group Top One, written for Aleksander Kwasniewski, the candidate of the post-1990 communist party ( Social Democracy of the Polish Republic [SLD]), and the other, entitled “The President” by the group Bayer Full, written for the Polish Peasant Party (PSL) candidate, Waldemar Pawlak.

In Opposition to the West Another aspect in which politics (though never overtly) appears in discopolo ideology is in the representation of Poland as a counterpoint to the West. This opposition is usually accompanied by a very negative judgement of the West – almost everything that comes from the West is conceived as not only worth little and just a fashion fad (and thus ephemeral) but also as destructive. Everything that comes out of Poland, on the other hand, is deemed to be valuable and inspirational, being related to a long tradition and having such merits as continuity and stability. Amongst those negative phenomena of Polish culture, for the dissemination of which Western countries are regarded as responsible, disco-polo fans mention drugs, violence, vulgarity, progressive selfishness, the decline of tradition and human loneliness. Aversion to the West and Western cultural products is voiced in the pejorative and radical pronouncements of disco-polo songwriters. In an interview about the “rotten West” Swierzynski, for example, says he finds it “indigestible.” He does not “like this mass culture where people

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complain that we have bad water so the best drink is Coca-Cola. And this is what we should drink too.” Seeing the West only from the perspective of its export of mass culture is characteristic of such interviews in which the expressions of distaste reach the point of hostility. Yet Western mass culture, as disco-polo adherents rightly say, finds exceptionally favourable conditions in Eastern European countries, which under the communist regimes were deprived of it. A response that disco-polo offers to Western mass culture “which is invading” Poland – bringing along drug problems and rock music that morally degrade Polish society – is based on emphasizing different social aspects of the idea of Polishness. The implication of some negative features traditionally ascribed to Poles by non-Poles undergoes considerable extenuation in the disco-polo ideology. The disco-polo argument goes that Poles have, for example, indeed some weakness for booze, but other nations are not free from this weakness either, and besides in Poland drinking is a public matter, while in the West drinking is done in a hypocritical fashion, which explains why you won’t meet drunks there on the street. In short, “let nobody say that every Pole loves booze … Every nation has an inclination to drink.” (Swierzynski). Another presumed stereotypical collective image in the West towards Poland, used by disco-polo, is of the gentry’s “golden freedom” as a proof of Polish political immaturity. This freedom enabled the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Polish gentry to dissolve Sejm (parliament) sessions by voicing the liberum veto, which effectively blocked the correct functioning of the Polish parliament. The “golden freedom” concept is very popular in disco-polo lyrics where it is shown as representative of Polish mentality and its connections with Eastern rather than Western culture. A severe critique is directed by disco-polo writers and fans towards the media which is, because of its role in shaping public taste, accused only of promoting Western culture in its worst form, and thereby depreciating native Polish culture. Hence the importance of the abovementioned Polish hospitality, which might be understand as an answer to the dehumanizing and objectifying processes prevailing in capitalist countries. They claim that Western music is not able to give Poles what disco-polo music can give them. Rock, blues, rap and techno music are merely fashions, snobbery, products of a culture incompatible with the Polish spirit. The average Pole has difficulty comprehending these kinds of contemporary pop-music for linguistic reasons (i.e., most songs are in English). If this average Pole knew that these lyrics were full of violence, hatred, and narcotic visions, he or she would certainly reject

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this music, argues Samborski. Instead, disco-polo claims to bring a moral renewal, voicing human solidarity, brotherhood and love. Disco-polo ideology expresses a similar attitude towards capitalist marketing, advertisement and promotion. Disco-polo “grew … by itself, without any connections, any television business. It began to sell itself. It worked its way onto private TV by itself” claims Samborski. This music does not need advertisement, because it uses intersubjective messages – “Every Pole would understand it straight away,” says Swierzynski. These critics of Western culture realize that their wholesale condemnation and rejection does not sound reasonable, so they try to moderate their charges. They admit that every culture has a right to express itself in specific ways, but should not impose its concepts on other cultures. Looking for an appropriate analogy to the phenomenon of Polish disco-polo, they point to American country music, German techno or Russian accordion playing (Samborski). Yet they seem to forget that disco music, which is of course a typical product of Western mass culture, was and still is the inspiration for disco-polo itself. Besides, they have considerable trouble explaining why they originally gave English names to their groups which they would now like to change into more familiar Polish names. Some of these, already mentioned, are Bayer Full, Toy Boys, and Fanatic.

Disco-polo and the Dilemmas of Polish Past and Present In its 1996–97 New Year’s issue Gazeta Wyborcza published an article on disco-polo whose author concluded, “disco-polo … ignores. It ignores culture altogether with the canon of the urban intelligentsia who aspire to govern the emancipation of the common people … It seems that … the time of Romanticism in Poland is coming to an end.” The author, Piotr Bratkowski, also claims to be hopeless in dealing with the disco-polo phenomenon.3 This confusion of Polish critics towards the disco-polo phenomenon seems to be the result of two main factors. First, these critics are clearly unprepared to analyse the phenomena of mass culture. Under the communist regime pop culture was relegated to the very margins of social and cultural life. The cultural sphere and especially high culture went far beyond simply aesthetic values. It became a domain of confrontation of different social and political perspectives that could not be expressed otherwise. Therefore, Polish intellectuals became accustomed to thinking of culture as a sphere in

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which the most important questions concerning the survival of the nation were discussed and solved. Second, the special circumstances of Polish history called for a consistent vision of the past. At face value disco-polo seems to provide this kind of interpretation of the past. It shows respect for traditional Polish values and defends the special role of the Polish nation. Discopolo thus could continue, even if in an impoverished version, to bear the traditional rhetoric of Polish nationalism. However, on closer view it reveals some alien elements: a certain fascination with the West, references to pop culture, even a parody of nationalistic motifs. This amalgam is in fact very far from any kind of ideology that has appeared in the history of Poland. So far the popularity of disco-polo and its close link with the supporters of the post-communist party (SLD) and the Polish Peasant Party suggests that this bizarre view appeals to the minds of a significant stratum of Polish society. Instead of familiar narratives, disco-polo may thus be an early sign of a changing mentality in Polish society.

NOTES Preface 1. Michael Oakeshott, 1962, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, New York: Basic Books, 40–41.

Chapter 1 1. Karl Jaspers, 1947, The Question of German Guilt, translated by E.B. Ashton, New York: The Dial Press, 31–32. 2. Ibid. 43. 3. Ibid. 73. 4. During the Round Table talks there was a malicious joke that former members of the Party were negotiating with present ones. 5. The most interesting description of the consciousness of the Stalinist nomenklatura is done in the 1987 book Them:Stalin’s Polish puppets, by Teresa Toranska, translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Kolakowska, New York: Harper & Row. 6. Andrzej Friszke, 1996, “Jakim panstwem byla Polska po 1956 r.?” (“What country was Poland after 1956?”), Wiez 2, 131–146. 7. Konrad H. Jarausch, 1996, “The GDR as History in United Germany”, outline of a paper presented at Berkeley Symposium, February 23, 1996. 8. See Mary Nolan, 1988, “The Historikerstreit and Social History”, New German Critique 44, Spring/Summer 1988, 51–80. 9. See, for instance, Maurice Bloch, 1985, “From cognition to ideology”, in Power and Knowledge: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches, edited by Richard Fardon, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 21–48; also Bruce Lincoln, 1989, Discourse and the Construction of Society, Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, Oxford: OUP, 5–7. 10. Mysl Polska, 14 April 1996. 11. Gazeta Wyborcza, 9–10 September, 1995 12. Noel Calhoun, 2004, Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe’s Democratic Transition, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 37. 13. David Ost, 1995, “Labor, Class and Democracy: Shaping Political Antagonism in Post-Communist Society”, in Markets, States and Democracy: The Political Economy of Post-Communist Transformation, Boulder: Westview Press, 178.

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14. David Ost, 2005, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe, Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press. 15. Miroslawa Grabowska, 2005, “Wyborcy nie wybacza” (“The Voters will not forgive”) Rzeczpospolita 254, 5–6. For further analysis of the mythologies of Solidarity see Chapter 2. 16. Eric Hobsbawm, 1983, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions”, in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1. 17. Ibidem, p. 2. 18. Pierre Bourdieu, 1991, Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 185. 19. Ibidem. 20. M. Strümer, quoted in John Torpey, 1988, “Introduction: Habermas and the Historian”, New German Critique, Spring/Summer 1988, 7. 21. Jerzy Turowicz, 1996, “Szkielet w szafie” (“Skeleton in the wordrobe”) Tygodnik Powszechny , 25, 1–2. 22. Adam Michnik, 1996, “Gray is Beautiful; A Letter to Ira Katznelson”, The East & Central European Program Bulletin, The Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research , 7/1, 6 23. Leszek Kolakowski, 1981, Main Currents in Marxisms. Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution, Volume 1, translated by P.S. Falla, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 24. Ernesto Laclau, 1990, New Reflections on The Revolution of Our Time, London/New York: Verso, 27. 25. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections, 42. 26. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, 1993, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, translated and with notes by Vadim Liapunov, edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2. 27. George Herbert Mead, 1964, Selected Writings, edited by A.J. Reck, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 266. 28. Ernst Tugendhat, 1986, Self-consciousness and Self-determination, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 29. I have of course borrowed the idea of thick and thin distinction from Clifford Geertz (Clifford Geertz, 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books). 30. There are a number of interesting analyses of the phenomenon of bio- and autobiography in the light of post-modern philosophy. See for instance: Robert Smith, 1995, Derrida and Autobiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, or the special issue of Modern Language Notes (“Autobiography and the problem of the subject”, Modern Language Notes, Special Issue, 93(4), May 1978). 31. Ernst Tugenhat, Self-conciousness, 204. 32. There was even a joke that as French aristocrats after the Revolution made their living selling family jewellery, so did the Polish nomenklatura selling group secrets. This is an allusion to the incredible success of some of these memoirs. For instance an interview with Edward.Gierek sold about one million copies. 33. Toranska Teresa, 1987, Them:Stalin’s Polish Puppets, translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Kolakowska, with an introduction by Harry Willets, London: Collins Harvill.

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34. My sources also include the interviews made by Teresa Toranska for the series of documentary films “Repetitions from the Polish People’s Republic”, directed by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz Polish TV production 1997. 35. An interesting self-account of Jaruzelski’s life is in Tina Rosenberg’s 1995 book The Haunted Land. Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism, New York: Random House, 125–260. 36. Some of them in fact decided to convert to Christianity. 37. Teresa Toranska, Stalin’s Polish Puppets, 127. 38. Ibid. 128. 39. For the biographies of Ciosek, Mijal and Siwak I have used their interviews from the cited TV program. I have used also interviews from Gierek’s book Edward Gierek 1990 Przerwana dekada wywiad przeprowadzony przez Janusza Rolickiego (“The Broken Decade, the interview by Janusz Rolicki”), Warszawa, Fakt and Albin Siwak, 2000 materials form Siwak’s autobiography Od lopaty do dyplomaty (“From a Shovel to a Diplomat”), Warszawa, Projektpublished by himself in 1994. 40. In describing their own lives, people perceive them as fragmented and shattered or else as consistent and integrated. Arguably, perception depends on the possibility of integrating individual personal narratives into the meta-narratives of historical necessity. As Vieda Skultans observes in her very interesting account of autobiographies of Latvian victims of Soviet terror it is very difficult to incorporate violence into narratives. She notes: “In Latvia, so many ordinary men and women … appeared to be obsessed with a sense of meaninglessness of their lives. Those informants who … failed to find meaning in the past and could not construct a coherent life story wept over lives wasted and spoilt” (Skultans, Vieda, 1997, “Theorizing Latvian lives: The quest for identity”, in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3 (4), 765). The meaning of lives was constructed through placing individual narratives in a wider perspective and by means of literary tropes of Latvian literature and culture. Then “the term “destiny” acts as a bridging concept between collective history and individual lives. To the extent that such lives are perceived as governed by destiny they have come to be seen as exemplification of national history. Freedom of narrative movement over time and space expands the source of narrative coherence to encompass tales of national destiny. Thus the memory upon which these narratives draw is as much social as personal” (ibid. 777). Yet, this perception is obviously different from politicians as objects of analysis. They seem to have an “instinctive” predisposition for giving meaning to their own activity. This meaning includes the idea of necessity of a particular activity from the beginnings of the biography. 41. Kazimierz Mijal himself was of a peasant background, and invoking the scientific character of political activity allows him to present himself as “a peasant but a servant of the working class” the statement made for the interview made by Teresa Toranska for the series of documentary films “Repetitions from the Polish People’s Republic”, directed by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz. 42. Jurgen Habermas, 1989, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society; translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. For the Habermas-Foucault debate see: Michael Kelly (ed), 1994, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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43. Ken Jowitt, 1992, New World Disorder. The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley: University of California Press, 16. 44. Ibid. 40. 45. Kathrine Verdery, 1996, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton N.J. Harvard: Princeton University Press, 19–38. 46. I remember the story, which was said in the most dramatic time in Poland just after the imposition of Martial Law, about the block of apartments. People living there were of different political orientation but all of them suffered the shortage of alcohol that was rationed at that time. So, they exchanged recipes for moonlight vodka and in this activity all political barriers were broken down. 47. I would not like here to go deeper into the theory of trust. I accept at the theroetical level the definition of trust given by Piotr Sztompka in his 1999 book Trust: A Sociological Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. His definition of trust is: “Trust is a bet about the future contingent actions of others” (ibid. 25). 48. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder, 253–254. 49. Ibid. 254. 50. The Solidarity Congress 1981: The Great Debate, 1990, edited, translated and introduced by George Sanford, The MacMillan Press Ltd, 197. 51. Andrzej Drzycimski and Tadeusz Skutnik (ed), Gdansk, Sierpien 80, Rozmowy (“Gdansk, August 1980, Talks”), Gdansk, Aida, 433. 52. The Polish March and the Prague Spring were probably the last attempt to use Marxism as an instrument against the communist regime. After those failed revolutions Marxism in Eastern Europe became marginalized to the status of official ideology or a sophisticated, academic discourse of intellectuals. 53. Michael Walzer, 1995, “The Concept of Civil Society”, in Toward a Global Civil Society, edited by Michael Walzer, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 9. 54. Adam Michnik, 1985, “The Polish War: A Letter from Bialoleka 1982”, in Letters from Prison and Other Essays, Berkeley: University of California Press, 28. 55. Ibid. 39. 56. Ibid. 40. 57. M. Wazler, “The Concept of Civil Society”, 16. 58. Ibid. 18. 59. Ibid. 21. 60. Stanislaw Lem 1977, “The Mask”, in Mortal Engines, translated from the Polish and with an introduction by Michael Kandel, New York: Continuum (The Seabury Press), 181–239. 61. Ibid. 181. 62. Ibid. 182. 63. Ibid. 185. 64. Ibid. 192. 65. Ibid. 193. 66. Ibid. 195. 67. Passim. 68. Ibid. 203–204. 69. Ibid. 202–203. 70. Ibid. 205.

Notes

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

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Ibid. 209. Ibid. 210. Ibid. 215. Ibid. 215. Ibid. 217. Ibid. 217–218. Ibid. 221. Ibid. 224. Ibid. 225. Ibid. 226 Ibid. 226. Ibid. 226. Ibid. 226–227. Ibid. 229. Stanislaw Lem, 1974, The Cyberiad. Fables for the Cybernetic Age, trans. by Michael Kandel, New York: Continuum (The Seabury Press), 162–163.

Chapter 2 1. John Searle, 1995, The Construction of Social Reality, New York: The Free Press, 24–26. 2. Mary Douglas, 1992, “Why Do People Want Goods?” in Understanding the Enterprise Culture. Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas, edited by Shaun Hargreaves Heap and Angus Ross, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 26. 3. Richard Fardon, 1999, Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography, London: Routledge, 213–215. 4. Mary Douglas, 1987, How Institutions Think, London: Routledge, 55. 5. Leon Festinger, 1957, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 243–259. 6. Jadwiga Staniszkis, 1991, The Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: The Polish Experience, translated by Chester A. Kisiel, Berkeley: University of California Press, 216. 7. Józef Tischner, 1993, Nieszczesny dar wolnosci (“A Fatal Gift of Freedom”), Krakow: Znak, 123. 8. This is Jadwiga Staniszkis’ point of view, see, J. Staniszkis, The Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe, 171–175. 9. Michal Federowicz, 2000, “Anticipated Institutions: The Power of Path-finding Expectations”, in Democratic and Capitalist Transitions in Eastern Europe. Lessons for the Social Sciences, edited by Michel Dobry, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 91. 10. Ibid. 97. 11. Ibid. 101. 12. Michel Foucault, 1977, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in Language, Countermemory, Practice. Selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, edited with an introduction, by Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 139.

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13. Ibid. 139–140. 14. Ibid. 153–154. 15. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 118–121. 16. J. Szacki, 1962, Ojczyzna, Naród, Rewolucja (“Fatherland, Nation, Revolution”) Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 42–47. 17. Paradoxes of Polish conservatism are shown in Marcin Krol, 1986’s book: Podroz romantyczna [Romantic Journey] Paris, Libella. 18. Polish Messianism was developed as a system by Andrzej Towianski but the idea of Poland as a Christ of the nations was very popular in Polish Romanticism. See, A. Sikora, 1984, Towianski i rozterki romantyzmu (“Towianski and Irresolutions of Romanticism”), Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 141–143. 19. M. Janion, 1989, Wobec zla (“In the Face of Evil”), Chotomow: Verba. 20. H. Markiewicz, 1990, “Wstep” (“Introduction”), in Eseje i studia o literaturze (“Essays and Studies of Literature”), by Stanislaw Brzozowski, Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1990, LXV–LXXIII. 21. The best, very well documented example of such an interpretation of Marxism is given in Volume 1 of Leszek Kolakowski’s 1981 Main Currents of Marxism. Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution, translated by P.S. Falla, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 22. The Marx-Engels Reader, 1978, edited by Robert C. Tucker, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 145. 23. Ibid. 10. The full text of Marx’s doctoral dissertation is published in vol. I of the German edition of Marx and Engels’s works (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band I, Erster Halbband, 1927, Frankfurt:, Marx-EngelsArchiv Verlagsgesellschaft, 1–144). 24. Friedrich Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State”, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 739. 25. Friedrich Engels, “Anti-Dühring”, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 727. 26. Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 484. 27. Ibid. 28. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1968, “What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement”, in Lenin on Politics and Revolution, Selected Writings, edited and introduced by James E. Connor, Indianapolis: Pegasus The Bobs-Merrill Company, 76. 29. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1975, “A Great Beginning”, in The Lenin Anthology, edited by Robert C. Tucker, New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 480. 30. Ibid. 485. 31. Ibid. 486–487. 32. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues”, in The Lenin Anthology, 668. 33. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feurbach”, in Marx-Engels Reader, 144. 34. Michel Foucault, 1988, “Technologies of the Self”, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, New York: Routledge, 225. 35. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom”, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 291. 36. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics”, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 262–269.

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37. Ibid. 266. 38. M. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics”, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 262. 39. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder, 253–254. 40. Ibid. 254. 41. Jerzy Szacki, 1998, Liberalism after Communism, translated by Chester A. Kisiel, Budapest: Central European University Press, 150–157. 42. Liberalism of the opposition in the seventies is called sometimes a protoliberalism, see Szacki, Liberalism After Communism, 74–77. 43. First Gdansk Congress of Liberals, 1989, Zapis dyskusji (Transcript of Discussion), Przeglad Polityczny 12/1989, 71, quoted in Szacki, Liberalism After Communism, 128. 44. I discuss the problem of national identity in my 1996 paper: “Polish Nationalism and National Identity”, Geschichte und Gegenwart 4, 201–211. 45. The role of symbols in the eighties is analysied in detail in Jan Kubik’s 1994 book The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: the Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 46. Gdansk, Sierpien ‘80, Rozmowy, 433. 47. Jozef Tischner, 1992, Etyka solidarnoœci oraz Homo sovieticus (“Ethics of Solidarity and Homo Sovieticus”), Krakow: Znak, 14–18. 48. Adam Michnik’s 1977 book, Dialog, Lewica, Kosciol (“Dialogue, Left and the Church”), Paris, Instytut Literacki Kultury was the most important for this discovery. 49. The idea of civil society as developed in Poland in the eighties was rather different from the Western usage of the same term. Compare for instance Michael Walzer’s 1992 paper “The Civil Society Argument” published in Dimensions of Radical Democracy Pluralism, Citizenship, Community edited by Chantal Mouffe, London: Verso. 50. Ernesto Laclau, 1996, Emancipation(s), London: Verso, 37. 51. Ibid. 38. 52. Ibid. 39. 53. Jacob Torfing, 1999, New Theories of Discourse. Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek, Oxford: Blackwell, 176. 54. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), 41. 55. Ernesto Laclau, 1995, “Subject of politics, politics of the subject”, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, volume 7, n°1, 146–164. 56. Leszek Koczanowicz, and Dorota Kolodziejczyk, 1999, “Nation, Identity, Transition: In What Sense Do We Live in the World of the ‘Post’”, in Democracy in Central Europe 1989–99, edited by Justyna Miklaszewska, Krakow, 287–302. 57. Ibid. 301. 58. Ernesto Laclau, 1990, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso, 61. 59. Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, 115.

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Chapter 3 1. William James, 1950, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, New York: Dover, 606. 2. Ibid. 641. 3. Ibid. 620. 4. Ibid. 650. 5. Ibid. 651. 6. M. Merleau-Ponty, 1994, Phenomenology of Perception, translated from the French by Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 412. 7. Ibid. 414. 8. Ibid. 416. 9. Ibid. 420. 10. Ibid. 424. 11. Ibid. 426. 12. Ibid. 430–431. 13. G.H. Mead, 1981, The Philosophy of the Act, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 240–247. 14. Mead ascribes a special role to the vocal gestures: “We are, especially through the use of the vocal gestures, continually arousing in ourselves those responses which we call out in other persons into our own conduct. The critical importance of language in the development of human experience lies in the fact that the stimulus is one that can react upon the speaking individual as it reacts upon the other.” George Herbert Mead, 1997, Mind, Self and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 69. 15. “Mind, which is a process within which this analysis and its indications take place, lies in a field of conduct between a specific individual and the environment, in which the individual is able, through the generalized attitude he assumes, to make use of symbolic gestures, i. e., terms which are significant to all individuals including himself.” G.H. Mead, 1981, “A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol”, in Selected Writings, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 247. 16. G.H. Mead, 1932, The Philosophy of the Present, Chicago: Open Court Company, 11. 17. Ibid. 49. 18. Ibid. 51. 19. Ibid.67. 20. Ibid. 90. 21. Ibid. 90. 22. Sandra Rosenthal and Patrick L. Bourgeois, 1991, Mead and Merleau-Ponty. Toward a Common Vision, New York: State University of New York Press, 85. 23. Pierre Bourdieu, 1991, Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 166. 24. Keith Jenkins, 1995, On “What is History”. From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White, London: Routledge, 19–21. 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1964, Thoughts Out of Season. Part II The Use and Abuse of History Schopenhauer as Educator, translated by Adrian Collins, New York: Russel and Russel,. 3.

Notes

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

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Ibid. 16. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 150. Ibid. 167. Maurice Halbwachs, 1980, The Collective Memory, New York: Harper and Row, 46–47. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 47. Maurice Halbwachs, 1992, On Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 42. Ibid. 182. Ibid. 183. Ibid. 183. Ibid. 184. Ibid. 184. Ibid. 188. Ibid. 189. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 126. Lewis A. Coser, 1992, “Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs 1877–1945”, in M. Holbwachs, On Collective Memory, 1–36. Paul Connerton, 1989, How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ibid. 22–23. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 45. In his definition of rites Connerton follows Steve Lukas’s definition. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 104. H. Joas, 1993, Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press and London, 248. J. Searle, 1995, The Construction of Social Reality, New York: The Free Press, 113–115. Ibid. 111. I use the term “normal society” per analogiam with Thomas Kuhn’s term “normal science”. Normal society is then society without self-reflection, and where there is no problem with legitimization. Ibid. 111. E.R. Leach, “Two Essays concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time”, in Rethinking Anthropology, London: Athlone, 125.

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65. Ibid. 125. 66. Ibid. 135. 67. Katherine Verdery, 1996, “What Was Socialism, and Why Did It Fall?”, in What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 37. 68. Katherine Verdery, “The ‘Etatization’ of Time in Ceausescu’s Romania”, in What Was Socialism and What Comes Next?, 40. 69. Ibid. 57. 70. Ibid. 57. 71. Kathrine Verdery, 1999, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. Reburial and Postsocialist Change, New York: Columbia University Press. 72. Ibid. 120–121. 73. Ibid. 122. 74. Ibid. 123. 75. Ibid. 123. 76. Here, I use the title of Iwona Irwing-Zarecka’s interesting book on memory. Iwona Irwing-Zarecka, 1994, Frames of Remembrance. The Dynamics of Collective Memory, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. She in a very interesting way analyses the political and cultural consequences of memory. 77. Johannes Fabian, 1983, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 144. 78. Ibid. 144. 79. Jon Elster, 2004, Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Appendix 1. This paper is based on the interviews taken for the documentary “Bara, Bara” made for Polish TV by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz in 1996. All fragments of interviews are taken from this film. 2. Tadeusz Sobolewski, 1996, “Pusta plaza” (“The Empty Beach”), Tygodnik Powszechny, 31, 2–3. 3. Lukasz Warzecha, 1996, “Pochwala disco polo” (“A Praise of Disco-polo”), Myl Polska, 32, 3–4. 4. Piotr Bratkowski, 1996, “Wenus i Tarzan na Sylwestra” (“Venus and Tarzan at a New Year’s Party”), Gazeta Wyborcza, 31 December 1996.

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Index action, 27–28 in Joas, 128 social, 128, 132, agent, 140, 152 human, 30 of international capital, 116 of regime, 4–6, 9, 12 Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD), 9, 11, 18, 158 answerability, 27 anti-Europeanism, 142 anti-free-market orientation, 17 Augustine, St, 23 autobiography, 34–36, 164n30 See also biography Bakhtin, Mikhail, 27–29, 31, 75 and dialogical tradition, 118 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 99 biography, 35, 56 Eastern European, 56 political, 37, 41 bodily practices, 95, 125–128 body, 123–127, 130 and experience of time, 123 as locus of remembering , 124 techniques of the, 126 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19 on political field, 37, 39 on symbolic power, 118 bureaucracy, 8, 48, 79 Calhoun, Noel, 13–15 capitalism, 39, 91–92 concept of time in, 130 Catholic Church, the, 9, 17, 45, 47, 50, 62, 154

and Communist Party, 104 role of, 79, 81 teaching, 82, 99, 101–102 chronopolitics (in Fabian), 133, 150 Cimoszewicz, Wlodzimierz, 10, 16 Ciosek, Stanis∏aw, 33–35, 37–38, 40–41 Civic Platform (PO), 15–17, 147, 150 civil society, 20, 42–43, 49–54, 99, 101, 103, 139, 149 class struggle, 85–88, 93, 96 collaboration, 4, 32, 139–140 accusation of, 6 collectivism, 43–44, 69 communist nostalgia, 8, 81, 154 communism, 2, 14, 18, 34–35, 38–39, 43–45, 69–70, 78, 96–98, 138 and civil society, 52 eschatological promise of, 86 Polish version of, 7 resistance to, 9 see also ideology community, 89–90, 106, 116 feeling of, 157 restoration of, 13 Connerton, Paul, 124–127 conservatism, 145 new, 148 Constitutional Tribunal, the, 140–141 culture, 94–95, 146, 148–149, 173 high, 79, 161 mass, 153, 159–161 national, 158 Polish, 155, 157, 159–160 popular, 153–154 and time, 68–69 Western, 81, 160–161

178

Index

Dasein, 31, 36, 117 decommunization, 4–6, 13, 15, 24 democracy, 42, 48, 78, 143–144 and civil society, 53 liberal, 13–15, 99, 139, 144–145, 149 Polish, 106 representative, 42, 99–100 description, thin and thick, 29 dialogue, 27–28 and construction of reality, 118 philosophy of, xi Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature (Marx), 85–86 disco-polo, 153–162 and “golden freedom” concept, 160 ideology of, 157–152 dissident, x, xii, 8, 11–13, 15, 31–33, 51–53, 70, 103, 149 Douglas, Mary, 68 Eastern Europe, 18, 32, 42–43, 48, 53–54, 160 and concept of time, 130 decommunization in, 13 privatization in, 71 process of transition in, 69 Election Action of Solidarity (AWS), 5 election, 35, 53, 104, 106, 137–138, 141, 146 and disco-polo, 159 free, 99 parliamentary of 1993, 22 parliamentary of 1997, 5 parliamentary of 2005, 15–16, 18, 137–138, 141 parliamentary of 2007, 150 presidential of 1996, 5 presidential of 2000, 6 presidential of 2005, 17, 18, 137–138, 141 Elster, John, 133–134 empty signifier (in Laclau), 104–107 Engels, Fredrick, 87–90 escape from freedom, 8, 52, 71, 103 ethics break between politics and, 51

in Foucault, 94–97 in Marxism, 88–90, 96–97 and politics, 48, 54 European Union, the, 137, 142, 143, 147, 150, 158 entry of Poland into, 11 Euroscepticism, 142 expectations, 74, 82, 104, 106–107, 131, 134–135, 150 genealogy of, xi, 72 ontology of, see ontology of expectations see also mythology Fabian, Johannes, 133, 150 Foucault, Michael, 42, on body, 126–127 on ethics and morality, 94–95 on genealogy, 72–73 on self, 95–97 Freedom Union (UW), 5, 146 free-market economy, 46–47, 71, 78, 81–83, 99, 104, 138, 145 French Revolution, the, 19, 25, 45, 48, 75 Friszke, Andrzej, 7 Gazeta Wyborcza (newspaper), 6, 11, 161 gentry, 12, 144, 157, 160 Gierek, Edward, 32, 35–36, 38, 40 Giertych, Roman, 142 Globalization, 149 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 32, 35–39 guilt (in Jaspers), 2–4, 26 Habermas, Jürgen, 42, 128 hegemony, 146 Heidegger, Martin, 28–29, 36, 114, 116–118 Historikerstreit, 20 Hobsbawm, Eric, 19 Home Army, the (AK), 9, 16 homo sovieticus, 52, 70 identity, 19, 60–62, 74, 76, 90, 106, 132 fear of losing, 149 national, 47, 77, 100–101, 157

Index

politics of, 17–18, 71, 106 ideologization of the state, 141–142, 148 ideology, 74, 98–101, 139 collectivist, 43–44, 58 communist, 1, 14, 42–44, 81–82, 100 liberal, 144–145 Marxist, 38–39, 96 and mythology, 74 official, 38–39, 43–44, 97 individualism, 43–44, 58, 84 Institute of National Memory, the, 6, 12 James, William, 110–112, 122–123 Janion, Maria, 75, 77 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 32, 49–50 Jaspers, Karl, 2, 4, 26 John Paul II, 100 Jowitt, Ken, 43–45 Kaczynski, Jaroslaw, 139, 140 Kaczynski, Lech, 16–17, 139 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 90 on time, 109–112 Kultura (newspaper), 1 Kuron, Jacek, 33, 52, 102–103 Kwasniewski, Aleksander, 1, 35, 40, 150, 159 of democracy, 18, 22 moral, 6, 22, 144 Laclau, Ernesto, 24–25, 45, 50, 74, 104–107 Law and Justice (PiS), 15–17, 137, 139, 142, 144–147 League of Polish Families (LPR), 18, 142 Left and Democrats (LiD), 150 legitimization, 22–23, 45, 49–50 Lem, Stanislaw, 55–59, 63–65 Lenin, Vladimir, 88–94, 96 liberal democracy, 14–15, 99, 144–145, 149 principles of, 13–14, 139 liberalism, 16, 42, 48, 71, 99, 145–147, 149–150 and republicanism, 144 liberating the future from the past, x, 20–21

179

the past from the future, x, 20–23 liberation, 102, 106, 153 of mankind, 84–85, 87 national, 74–75 loss of independence, the, 75–76 loyalty, 32, 39, 41, 96, 154 lustration, 5–6, 12–13, 67, 137, 140–141 Martial Law, 3, 32, 49–50, 80, 100–101 Marx, Karl, 55, 84–90, 93 Marxism, 36–39, 55, 75, 83–86, 90 Mead, George Herbert, 27, 29, 31, 112–118, 120–121, 128 memory, 20, 23, 54, 60, 63, 67, 111, 117, 123–127, 134, 151, 153 of the body, 126 collective, 121–125 difference between individual and social, 121, 124 habit-, 124 politics of, see politics of memory social, 68, 121–125, 127, 134 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 110–112, 116 Messianism, Polish, 76, 168n Michnik, Adam, 10–11, 123, 49–50, 52, 103 Mijal, Kazimierz, 32, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 165 Miller, Leszek, 11 modernization, 142–146, 150 communist, 78–79, 101 of Poland, 13, 82, 146 myth of origin, 19, 73, 103–104 mythology, 73–74, 104, 106–107 national identity, see identity, national nationalism, 39, 48, 106, 146, 149–150, 162 Nazism, 56 Nietzsche, Friedrich, on history, 72, 73,119 Oakeshott, Michael, 9, 119 October, Polish, the, 47 October Revolution, the, 92, 97 Of Truth and Reconciliation (Michnik, Cimoszewicz), 10 Olszewski, Jan, 5

180

Index

ontology of expectations, xi, 28, 67, 69, 71, 150 opposition, 3, 6, 12, 19–22, 42, 49–50, 98, 102, 104 Ost, David, 14–15 Party, the in Lenin, 88–89, 92 Polish United Worker’s Party, the, 1, 3, 22, 33–34, 40–41, 43, 45, 96 past, 1–27, 157, 161 “break with the”, 24, 25, 71, 104, 137 past-future relation, the, 21, 24–25 reconstruction of the, 24, 115, 117–118 See also politics of the past patriotism, in disco-polo, 154, 158 phenomenology, 109–110, 116 Philosophy of the Present, The (Mead), 114 Polish hospitality, 58, 60 Polish Peasant Party (PSL), 154, 159, 160 Polish Republic, First, 137 Fourth, 10, 12–13, 137, 146 Second, 137 Third, 12, 137–138 Polish Social Democracy (SDLP), 18 Polish United Worker’s Party, the, see the Party Polishness, 77–78, 160 politics of existence, 41–42 of memory, 132–134, 151 of the past, x, 10, 15, 18, 21, 23 politics of history, 140–141, 146 of time, x–xi, 132–133, 149 populism, 81–83, 138–139 post-communism, 137–139 post-post-communism, 137–139, 149–150 pragmatism, xi, 109 process of transformation, x, 8, 14, 21, 41, 70–71, 81, 119, 138, 147, 149 proletariat, the, 87–88, 91, 93 public sphere, 42–43, 48, 52, 106, 159

Radio-Maryja, 147–148 reconciliation, 3, 21, 23, 35, 133 responsibility, 3–4, 7, 22–23, 26–30, 41, 131 “return to” Europe, 80–81 Romanticism, 71, 161 Round Table Agreement of 1989, The, 1–2, 11, 33, 35, 99, 104 Rydzyk, Tadeusz, Father, 147 see also Radio Maryja Rywin affair, 11 science fiction, x, 21, 54–56 see also Lem, Stanislaw Searle, John, 67, 128–129 self, in Bakhtin, 27 dialogical, 31 in Mead, 27, 31 self-consciousness, 31, 85–86, 116 self-realization, 41 see also Foucault Seym, the (the Polish parliament), 4, 6, 11, 17–18, 139, 140, 160 simulation, 56–59, see also Lem, Stanislaw Siwak, Albin, 35–41 “small stabilization”, 7 Sobolewski, Tadeusz, 153–154 Social Democracy of the Polish Republic (SDPR), 9, 22, 70, 82, 159 Solidarity, 1, 4, 9, 15–18, 33, 35, 46–51, 82, 97–102, 107, 139 Soviet Union, the, 39–40, 78, 80 strike, 46, 100–101 massive, 35, 97 subbotnik, 91–92 subjectivization, 77–78, 95, 112 Swierzynki, Slawomir, 158–161 Sztaniszkis, Jadwiga, 70 time different orders of, 131 as dimension of existence, 112, 117–118 perception of, 110, 116, 132 physical, 109 political, x, 67, 109, 133–135

Index

social construction of, 119–121 social, ix–xi, 67, 109, 117, 129, 132–135 Tischner, Jozef, 46, 52, 70, 102–103 Toranska, Teresa, 31, 34 totalitarianism, 49, 52–53, 70, 82, 102 transcendental principles, 21, 26, 28 transformation, process of, See process of transformation transitional justice, 61, 133–134 tribalism, 149–150 Tugendhat, Ernst, 28–31 Turowicz, Jerzy, 22 Tusk, Donald, 16 Tygodnik Powszechny (newspaper), 3, 22, 102, 147, 153–15 utopia, 54–56, 99, 103 ethical, 51–52, 103 values, ethical, 46–48, 88 national and religious, 14, 143–144, 148–150 traditional, 13, 16–17, 83, 148–151 Verdery, Kathrine, 130–132 Walesa, Lech, 5–6, 35, 47, 99, 101 Walzer, Michael, on civil society, 48–49, 52–53 Wiez (newspaper), 3 Wildstein List, 12 Workers’ Defense Committee, 98 Yalta agreement, the, 78, 81, 100 Zmarz-Koczanowicz, Maria, 165n34, 172n1 Znak (newspaper), 3

181